How Many Machines Do You Need To Run Your Site?

highscalability.com

11 points·aaroneous··5 comments

Servers are so damn powerful these days that it's a bit misleading to use the number of servers as a measurement. The standard a few years ago was dual processor PIII ~1Ghz machines with 1-4GB memory. These days it's a 4+ core monster with 8GB+ memory.

Steve Huffman of Reddit posted on their latest server stats, which is interesting: http://reddit.com/info/2gdcv/comments/c2geky

Most of the sites these days with a ton of servers just have Google envy or investors who want money to be "put to work". Server and network gear is a really easy way to go through money.

HighScalability is an insane site. Their stuff on how Google's datacentre works is crazy! http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

I'll let you know after we launch if this works, but we just have a single dedicated box for 99/mo.

We launched our site with only one machine (dedicated host I think we paid about $100/mo for it as well) and had stories about us on the big blogs (TechCrunch, Gigaom, etc) - it performed like a champ. I guess it depends on what your app is like though.

Awesome, good to know.. I was a little nervous that I didn't have a massive cluster ready to go ;) I'm just going to make sure my database indices are in the correct places and see how launch does.

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