hardware-infrastructure

hardware infrastructure for public web application

I'd like to start a free budget/personal finance site and will need plenty of horsepower and storage. I'm definitely a nubee, so how does one get started in terms of hardware infrastructure? Do I need to get a dedicated IP from my ISP and obtain my own servers? Do I go with amazon or Sql Server Data Services/Azure or something like th...

Why is it not advisable to have the database and web server on the same machine?

Listening to Scott Hanselman's interview with the Stack Overflow team (part 1 and 2), he was adamant that the SQL server and application server should be on separate machines. Is this just to make sure that if one server is compromised, both systems aren't accessible? Do the security concerns outweigh the complexity of two servers (ext...

Would it ever be wise to have a SQL server per web server?

I'm wondering if, under the circumstances that You get lots more reads than writes Your SQL server of choice is cheap/free and offers a fast mirroring/replication service Your database isn't insanely large rather than having separate SQL servers it would be better to have an instance of SQL on each machine getting instant updates fr...

Physical Cores vs Virtual Cores in Parallelism

When it comes to virtualization, I have been deliberating on the relationship between the physical cores and the virtual cores, especially in how it effects applications employing parallelism. For example, in a VM scenario, if there are less physical cores than there are virtual cores, if that's possible, what's the effect or limits pla...