Hosting and CDN for startup video sharing site

This question is for all the gurus here. Please help this novice x I am starting a video sharing site like YouTube in India. I want to offer the best quality possible, at minimum cost. Nothing new about it, right? :). I have done some research on the dedicated hosting services and CDN services available and I have some basic knowledge on these. Following are my requirements 1) My budget is $500 to $1000 per month for hosting (including CDN if and as applicable). 2) I will need around 500GB of storage and 1TB per month of bandwidth in first 2-3 months and then about 10TB of storage and 5TB per month of bandwidth. And more ... depending on how big it gets (I can afford more when it gets big) 3) 90% of my viewers are in India. Other 10% are in US and UK. Based on the above, could you please answer my following questions? 1) Can I go with just a good dedicated server to start with and get a CDN service later on when the site gets big? Or do you think its wise to start with a CDN service? 2) Should I look for a server closer to India? They are pretty expensive in Asia? Should I look for one in Western Europe or at least Western US? How big a difference does it make? 3) Could you suggest the best dedicated hosting and CDN service based on my requirements? 4) I can get unmetered bandwidth on a 100Mbps pipe for my budget. Do you think that will be fine to start with? 5) Anything else I am missing? Also, could you also please give any tips on how to minimize the bandwidth (buffering, lower bitrate etc..)? Thanks a lot for your suggestions!

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Future of EJB3 !! ??

What is the future of EJB3 in the industry , given the current trends ? There are a lot of arguments regarding EJB3 being heavy weighted ..... Also, what could be the alternatives of EJB3 ? How about the scalability, persistence, performance and other factors ?

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1 Master, N Slaves

Hello all, Reading the site you can note that "1 Master for writes, N Slaves for reads" scheme is used offen. How is this implemented? Who decides where writes and reads go? Something in application level or specific database proxies, like Slony-I? Thanks.

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thesimsonstage.ea.com

Could anyone make an overview of thesimsonstage.ea.com architecture, i.e. some stats, wich technology thay use, how they implement karaoke flash-based player, which media server they use, how many bandwidth does it need, etc. Any information will be helpful. Thanks.

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Synchronizing databases in different geographic locations

Our company offers a web service that is provided to users from several different hosting centers across the globe. The content and functionality at each of the servers is almost exactly the same, and we could have based them all in a single location. However, we chose to distribute the servers geographically to offer our users the best performance, regardless where they might be. Up until now, the only content on the servers that has had to be synchronized is the server software itself. The features and functionality of our service are being updated regularly, so every week or two we push updates out to all the servers at basically the same time. We use a relatively manual approach to do the updating, but it works fine. Sometime soon, however, our synchronization needs are going to get a bit more complex. In particular, we'll soon start offering a feature at our site that will involve a database with content that will change on an almost second-by-second basis, based on user input and activity. For performance reasons, a complete instance of this database will have to be present locally at each of our server locations. At the same time, the content of the database will have to be synchronized across all server locations, so that users get the same database content, regardless of the server they choose to visit. We have not yet chosen the database that we'll use for this functionality, although we are leaning towards MySql. (We are also considering PostgreSQL.) So, my question for the assembled experts is: What approach is the best one for us to use to synchronize the database instances across our servers? Ideally, we'd like a solution that is resilient to a server location becoming unavailable, and we'd also prefer a solution that makes efficient use of bandwidth. (Processing power doesn't cost us a lot; bandwidth, on the other hand, can get expensive.) FWIW ... (1) Our servers run Apache and Tomcat on top of Centos. (2) I've found the following "how to" that suggests an approach involving MySQL that could address our needs: http://capttofu.livejournal.com/1752.html Thanks!

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how to: Load Balancing with iis

hello world, can you tell me how i can implement a load balancing of a web site running under iis - windows server 2003/08

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a8cjdbc - update verision 1.3

The new version of a8cjdbc finished some limitations. Now Clobs and Blobs are supported, and some fixes using binary data. The version was also fully tested with Postgres and mySQL. Since Version 1.3 there is also a free trail version for download available. Check it out and test yourself... Take a look at: http://www.activ8.at/homepage/en/a8cjdbc.php I've downloaded the latest version and setup a environment with one virtual database and two database backends. I tried to make a "non real life szenario": The first backend was a Postgres node, the second was a mySQL node. Everything works fine - failover - recoverylog, etc... with to different backend database types. So check out the trial version and test yourself the clustered driver and give me some results about your experience with a8cjdbc. As I only tested mySQL and Postgres (and the non real life szenario with two different backend types) - maybe someone else have experiences with out databases? greetings Wolfgang

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many website, one setup, many databases

Hi, I will need to host abound 500-1000 websites, all of them use drupal, What I thought was, to make all of these websites point to a single setup of drupal and make them run from there. I thought of using different databases for each website.. Do you think it'll work? Is there a better way to go about it?

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Starting a website from scratch - what technologies should I use?

Hi, if you were to design your own highly scalable website from scratch, what technologies would you use? Based on Web 2.0 popularity, LAMP seems to be high in the running. But would you tack on CakePHP? Drupal? or build your framework/CMS from scratch? What version of Linux runs best for a scalable website? Would you consider Windows and .NET? Java? Or do you want to throw a brick at me for even suggesting such heresies? Would you prefer Postgres, Tomcat, Perl, Python, or any of that other *NIX fancy stuff...why or why not? Please forget for the moment, "use what you know" argument. I am pretty versatile, and can look for an expert in whatever platform I choose. So all skills being equal, I'm looking for the best community support, the fastest development time and most importantly, the best scaling approach. Let's say, for fun, that I'm planning for the website to have as many messages going back & forth as an eBay. Definitely building this on a budget.. Jason

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Scale to China

Hello all, does anyone have experience in scaling a european website to china? The main problem in china is the internet connectivity to websites outside china, that means latency and packetloss (and perhaps filtering) make things difficult. The options I see are: 1. Host you application in china, but where? I haven't got a answer from any chinese ISP I contacted. On the other hand I don't really want to host in china. 2. Build your own CDN. Wikipedia shows how it goes. Get a bunch of machines (but where? see point 1) put squid on them, implement intelligent cache invalidation and you're set. But where can I get machines in china? Where do I need them in china? There are soe big isps with limited peering capability, so I'd need servers in every network. 3. Get professional CDN services. Akamai, ChinaCache, CDNetworks, etc etc.. They all provide services in china. The problem is: they are all very expensive. 4. Amazon EC2/S3 ? Is it worth thinking about this way? I am not sure, because they only have US and Ireland based datacenters. So we are stuck to the connectivity problem.. My favourite way: Rent a bunch of linux servers in 4-5 big cities in china in different networks and build my own CDN. What do you think? Regards Bjoern

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