Great nairaland gurus, please be mean with me: is it very possible for a site
like jamb/big one like twitter to be cloud hosted with a host like rackspace,ukfast /whatever with CDN pulling
support like Amazon S3......The main point is just without having their own server farm...and with options like
load balancing, grid and cluster configuration e.t.c, IS IT POSSIBLE?

Yes.

@ seun, please shed more light on the load balancing and configurations aspect

Gladly. Here goes: You don't need load balancing. You don't need a server cluster. Unless your problem size is 10 times Nairaland.

@Poster, first EXPLAIN what it is your problem is. Then we can better help.

An application that gonna be operating btw PHP Zend & Yii frameworks and huge read/write DB activity, Multimedia of all types handling in great measure and its needed to scale for about 20million views per day: tell me I don't need a server farm for this--

g9kate: An application that gonna be operating btw PHP Zend & Yii frameworks and huge read/write DB activity, Multimedia of all types handling in great measure and its needed to scale for about 20million views per day: tell me I don't need a server farm for this--

You are gonna be streaming multimedia? Talk to those who specialse in such, like Akamai and Limelight.
Streaming media is not for the fainthearted.

Try this evaluation from Microsoft: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2950-u/papers/CDN-measuring-IMC08-huang.pdf

This will come in handy for you: MetaCDN: Harnessing ‘Storage Clouds’ for high performance content delivery ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.144.7766&rep=rep1&type=pdf )

g9kate: An application that gonna be operating btw PHP Zend & Yii frameworks and huge read/write DB activity, Multimedia of all types handling in great measure and its needed to scale for about 20million views per day: tell me I don't need a server farm for this--

before u get to 20 million viewers, you will know

a) You aren't at 20 million yet
b) When you get there, you can hire experts to help you scale

Don't put the cart before the horse

Streaming media is not some sort of try your luck game.

He needs to know his architecture right now. And that architecture needs to be scalable.

I disagree

Beaf: Streaming media is not some sort of try your luck game.

He needs to know his architecture right now. And that architecture needs to be scalable.

I suppose by scalable architecture you mean a dynamic architecture that can be easily modified to suit needs by the moment without wasting resources. Right?. How is starting out with a server farm scalable?.

lordZOUGA:
I suppose by scalable architecture you mean a dynamic architecture that can be easily modified to suit needs by the moment without wasting resources. Right?. How is starting out with a server farm scalable?.

My earlier post did not mention server farms and the OP specifically says he does not want a server farm too. Where is your question coming from, bro?

Beaf:

My earlier post did not mention server farms and the OP specifically says he does not want a server farm too. Where is your question coming from, bro?

your post sounded as if you were nudging him towards the server farm option. Guess I misunderstood

@Poster, by any chance, are you putting together a specification document for the project? If yes, then definitely you will need to document that as traffic increases there will likely be a need for a server farm to be considered, and depending on processing needs serious look at loadbalancing. However, with many of the hosting services these days, you rarely need to worry about all that as much of that is taken care of for you, as long as you architect your application in such a manner that it scales well as load increases, and honestly, ALL applications ought to be developed this way, regardless of whether one expects 100 or 200 million people-traffic.

I would advice that you research Cloud hosting services out there. Many of them allow you to pay as you go for additional resources, as the need arrives. And they can give you a better idea of what to expect with their service. Try www.RackSpace.com for information. You should be able to have an online chat with one of their customer service reps, and they can give you a better idea of how that will work in your case.

@kobojunkie. thanks a lot: your specs are particullarly what I wanted to hear 'cos I don't want a situation dat I'll be opting for a re-write/re-structing in the nearest future. thanks

If you care about performance, use a dedicated server with lots of RAM. The cloud is a system that allows you to set up deliciously complex configurations involving dozens of virtual servers that, together, would end up not performing as well as a single, well-tuned dedicated server with lots of RAM, while being much more complicated to manage. The cloud is designed and priced for occasional use, such as running CPU-intensive batch jobs. For web hosting, you should start with a regular VPS and move to a dedicated server later.

you simply need a cloud account, i use rackspacecloud.com

and yes like Beaf said, he needs to plan ahead
based on what OP said, I wont recommend a dedicated server cos it will require migration very soon when your traffic surges, It will become very expensive to manage as you will require more disk space, Cores and RAM. and you could be paying 10,000USD monthly and still end up with a crawling server if traffic surges than expected

Moving on cloud accounts from startup lets you add server instances at anytime along the line so if you see traffic surges, all you do is create another instance from the pre-configured saved instance and add it as a node, that can take less than 5 minutes to setup. if traffic plummets, you can shut down some nodes with a few clicks, very similar to OOP.
the fact that you pay per hour makes is unarguably the best, You can also save an instance in your CDN-based Storage, it's as cheap as hell, rackspace storage costs as low as 10cents/Gig monthly. The rackspace guys have done the homework for you by partnering with popular CDNs like Akamaiand they have put the option in your cloud panel.

some cloud providers have support for load balancing on standard ports like 80, 1935, etc which you pay for.
I will recommend you employ the services of a professional to help you implement an application level cluster (using Apache Casandra or JGroup or the likes) so you dont have to pay for the load balancing service which is always billed per request.

Just signup for an account, you will grab the rest from there.
Except there is a need to hide contents from end users, i.e preventing users from saving media files locally, there is no need installing a streaming server,
there are many application you can use such as Lame, ffmpeg which are readily available for both linux and windows.

just google up and compare prices, we have HPCloud, rackspacecloud, Amazon etc.

Thanks guyz: you all have done well, infact I believe NL can become a kinda stackoverflow for some of us. Seun,just keep it moving: the future is here. And can anyone help with a good J2ME java developer and a programmer that can work-out multimedia streaming solutions.

@g9kate
please create another thread like the mod said, maybe share a link to it here.
i can help with the multimedia streaming.