Low Cost Technical Architecture for a Website Backend

Question

I'm looking at opening up a website in the near future and aside from the standard domain registration costs, I'm unsure of how to proceed. I'm expecting the volume of data to be quite significant and looking at many webhosts it seems that while they might offer extreme bandwidth caps, I've been told they often suspend accounts before you reach that monthly limit.

Are there are any ways I can offload the bandwidth intensive components to a separate host that specialises in extremely heavy data consumption, and just keep the website elements hosted on a standard account. While I realise having my own set of server's would be best, I'm trying to find a relatively cost efficient way to do it at the start.

Answer 1

Check out Amazon S3, I think they just revised their pricing model...

Answer 2

You probably need to look at something like Amazon AWS. They are designed to help with scalability especially when you bandwidth and space requirements may get large. http://aws.amazon.com/

Answer 3

Look at using a Content Delivery Network.

A CDN is a service that allows you to host large assets (think images or videos) to a separate host. You still run your website from your vanilla web server, but the bandwidth-heavy hosting is handled by the CDN.

They also have other benefits, such as having multiple servers around the globe, and will route incoming requests to the one that is closest to each user.

Answer 4

Besides S3, Cachefly might also be an option. Cachefly is a very low-cost CDN, relatively speaking. Compared to S3 its more expensive, but Cachefly also acts as a CDN, which S3 does not.

If all your visitors are either US/EU only, S3 will probably be perfect. It you have visitors from different parts of the globe and speed is an issue, a CDN will probably serve you better.

Answer 5

I second the suggestion to moves static items to separate asset server(s). From what I have seen, Cachefly is a decent CDN.

If you are looking to save money up front, Velocix offers a "free" CDN service up to a cap.

The other suggestion I would make is if you use any Javascript frameworks to check if Google hosts them as part of the Google AJAX Lib API. Use their infrastructure to quickly load the libs.