Dedicated Servers + Scalable Web Architectures

[Marc Lanctot]

Hello everyone,

First I will introduce myself. I'm a grad CS student who'll soon be 
living in Toronto. I'm 28 years old and have been back and forth from 
academia to the industry. I've been involved with Linux for some time 
now, mostly system admin experience -- no kernel hacking or anything 
like that....... yet? I'm very happy to see that there is what looks to 
be an active Linux User community in Toronto and I'm looking forward to 
meeting some of you soon.

I am looking into building a new "Web 2.0" web site which focuses on 
user-contributed content. I have lots of ideas and after thinking about 
this and discussing it for about a month, I think I can "do it properly" 
when it comes to the actual building of the site.. eg. I have a wealth 
of experience with Apache, MySQL, PHP etc. but I lack experience in the 
large-scale/high-performance realm. I expect(hope?) the site to get 
really popular, really quickly, and so I need to be prepared to handle 
lots of hits and quick data retrieval.

That being said, I have real questions:

1. I'd like a *reliable* dedicated server to host the site. I'd prefer 
one hosted in Toronto or Montreal for low trip response times, but 
that's not crucial. I tried tophostingcenter but their service was 
really bad (I can elaborate on that). I've now (temporarily) gone back 
with ServerPronto because I had used it before.. it was affordable, very 
reliable, and their customer service was just awesome. However, if I can 
do as well with a local server I'd surely consider it.

2. I'd like a recommendation on an architecture or *good* book on this 
subject, or even better pointer to scientific studies which compare 
different architectures in practical experiments. I'm very familiar with 
the Apache/MySQL/PHP setup so that is my current preference -- as long 
as it can scale! I'd be happy using Tomcat/JSP/Servlets if it means it 
means better scalability in the end. People have told me that Ruby on 
Rails doesn't scale-- after playing with it a bit two years ago it 
doesn't seem hard to believe, but it was still more of a superficial 
investigation than anything else.

Ultimately, I'd like if people can give me recommendations based on 
their experiences rather than suspicions, but I think any discussion 
that come of this might be generally useful to us all.

Thanks for your time.

Marc

-- 
There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any
programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write
bad code.
   -- Flon's Law
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