I want to build a website and I have a question about traffic and code. How much does code effect the site when talking about traffic? I know hardware and bandwidth are important. But when I spoke to a sales person about getting a quote to build a site, he told me that the code you pay for makes a difference in price. He said if you have a site that has 40,000 users is different than 1 million users. I can see here where hardware and bandwidth can be an issue but the code? He also mentioned about the code being able to extend out to more servers. How true is this? The design I’m looking at is HTML5-PHP-MySQL. I can actually see where sloppy MySQL code might effect the site when there are a lot of users but PHP and HTML5?
Thanks for the reply. Do most programmers code to best practices to ensure optimal code and design best practices for scalability? I guess my question should be, do I pay for scalable code from the beginning? Is that even realistic? I can see if I grow like Facebook where the code will have to be changed all the time. But starting a new site with guesses on how many people we will get in the beginning, what’s the right way? Is there a right way?
Sorry, it was a long day for me, and I took the weekend off. To be honest, that isn’t my expertise. While I know a decent amount of PHP, I could not tell you if a block of code will die if it is hit 100 times at once or 20,000.
Do most programmers code to best practices to ensure optimal code and design best practices for scalability?
I would say it all depends on the programmers knowledge/background. Since people and tools (dreamweaver, visual studio, etc) still have issues writing valid HTML, you cannot make this assumption. Like I said, I am comfortable with PHP, but couldn’t tell you how much load a site could take.
do I pay for scalable code from the beginning?
If you think your product is going to take off, it is much better to start with scalable code. Your best course of action is to gain some ground-level knowledge about it, so when you talk to developers, you can tell if they are giving you knowledge or fluff. then determine if yours and their pricepoint match.
I can see if I grow like Facebook where the code will have to be changed all the time
Most of Facebook’s sucess is in the background. They use a database type called Big Table, most people use MySQL when using PHP. Again I don’t have experience with Big Table, so I can’t talk much about it.