Outgrowing dedicated server ?

[CasualNerd]

This is not an issue I am currently facing but I like to look ahead and make plans - I am certainly hoping I outgrow my hosting because that would mean I've become more successful.

Anyway my question is this - for a small time website owner like myself, if I outgrow a dedicated server (for an image hosting website) what is the next step up in terms of high bandwidth hosting ?

I know nothing about technical server admin, and even a 100mbps managed server will eventually become overloaded if things keep growing. Are there companies that specialise in this kind of thing ?

[Dan Grossman]

It depends on what part you're outgrowing.

If it's just the bandwidth, then you can add more servers with more links, or outsource the file hosting.

Amazon S3 is designed for this.

[01globalnet]

There are many companies around that can setup load balancers and high availability setups. And of course there are many ways to do it on your own or have a fully managed solution. Places like Cartika, Liquidweb, Wiredtree etc. etc. can offer such solutions - the bandwith with these companies is expensive, so you can have your application on these companies and the user uploaded content with other datacenters that provide cheaper bw.

[CasualNerd]

It depends on what part you're outgrowing.

If it's just the bandwidth, then you can add more servers with more links, or outsource the file hosting.

Amazon S3 is designed for this.

Like I said, I haven't outgrown my hosting yet, but I imagine it'll probably be space before bandwidth. It could also be CPU / database restrictions as I'm not sure how the script will perform under heavy load.

I'm more wondering about the practicality of managing the site itself, what do I need to do to spread the files / database across servers when the script is designed so simply ?

I've looked at S3 before, I'll look into it more. I got the feeling it wasn't for commercial use first time round.

[CasualNerd]

There are many companies around that can setup load balancers and high availability setups. And of course there are many ways to do it on your own or have a fully managed solution. Places like Cartika, Liquidweb, Wiredtree etc. etc. can offer such solutions - the bandwith with these companies is expensive, so you can have your application on these companies and the user uploaded content with other datacenters that provide cheaper bw.

Thanks, that's the sort of thing I was looking for, I just wasn't sure what I was even asking for.

[Dan Grossman]

I've looked at S3 before, I'll look into it more. I got the feeling it wasn't for commercial use first time round.

It's pretty exclusively for commercial use.

SitePoint uses it to serve all the files on their marketplace and book downloads when they run a promotion.

All the images on Twitter.com are hosted on S3

And there are a number of file and image hosting services already running on S3

[CasualNerd]

Thanks Dan, just the sort of information I needed.

[01globalnet]

I am not a fan of the pay-as-you-go model for static content - an attack can probably lead to big charges (I may be wrong of course).

For static content I like the services with a fixed amount of bandwidth, but scalable, too - like Dyanavol from Layeredtech that is based on 3tera, and it is scalable with failover (http://thegridlayer.com/products/dynavol.php) - I have no experience, but I would like to try such services.

Any other similar services for static content like the above?