Hi, we are writing a business plan and require some price estimates in
order to project financials.  Our website will be very similar to
www.elance.com.  Currently, we are running a "test" site which is on a
single hosted server (with 1and.com) with the following specs: 3.06
intel p4, 2GB DDR RAM, 120GB IDE HD.

We have been advised that this site could only handle 10 simultaneous
users at the same time (we have not yet tested it).  For the financial
model, we need to know some rough price estimates.

We would like to have a 3-tiered architecture (if this is best) with
load balancing (software or not?), firewall, etc.

1. How much would a system capable of handling say up to 1000-3000
simultaneously users cost?

2. How much would a "high-end" full e-commerce site capable of
handling over 10,000 simultaneous users cost?

3. Are these systems hosted at remote sites and "rented" or do we have
to buy all the equipment, store it in our office, and then get a T1
line?

4. We also want to have backup servers that kick-in if the others go
down.  Is there a need to have these located on seperate coasts (as we
have been told)?

4.  Please provide your suggestions and price estimates.  I realize
this is all very vague, but we just need some rough estimates of
prices and a breakdown of the options, so feel free to provide price
ranges.  Thanks very much.

OK, I dunno about the prices, BUT.. with that server, I'm sure you can
have much more than 10-12 simultaneous users. Actually, your
bottleneck the is the IDE driver, which should be a SCSI for faster
results. Also, it depends on the bandwidth you have.

If you have, say a T1 connection, with that server (replacing the HD
to a scsi), you could get up to 200-300 connections at the same time.
Usually, if you want to handle lots of users, you place several web
servers (depending on your traffic it could go from 5 up to whatever
you want). I used to admin a site which had 1 mil hits per day and we
had 6 web servers load balanced.

First the load balancing was with DNS (round robin DNS) but then we
switched to a hardware piece (cisco arrowpoint, which works pretty
good and costs around 2k on ebay!).

You usually buy the equipment and place it in a Data center, which
will have the Internet connection and the racks to mount your
equipment. They can provide it also, but it'll cost much more. They
charge you a monthly fee and you normally have a good internet
connection (your website), and depending on the DC, they have all the
elements to host hundreds of web sites, application servers, etc.

If the server goes down, and you have a load balancer, users won't
even notice that a server is missing. Your only chance of having the
whole site down is when all of your servers lose connectivity to the
internet, so I don't see a need to host them on different coasts (nor
DC).

Hope it helps, somehow.

Lior

I don't know who told you 10-12 users but I am running an dedicated
server with OLM with only 868meg memory, 40 gig drive and 2.6 intel
with two Miva merchant stores that get about 300-400 users an hour. A
lot depends on what your users will do once logged in. How cpu or
memorey intensive your programs will be. Through put to the internet
should not be a problem. I would recomend letting a large ISP like OLM
or other company manage your servers unless you want to get into
starting up an internal IT department. They will be able to upgrade
your servers on the fly as you need more power. You have a lot of
info. not supplied here, the most importtant are what the programs
will be that you will be running on the server ? You have to be
careful because some consultants will try to talk you into way more
than needed ethier through ignorance or trying to pad pockets.

it's similar to what a lot of ISPs do. It's a case of understanding
the nature of the transactions that your hardware suite will be tasked
with. We run a number of Free ISPs in the UK like
www.12free.co.uk
www.freeukisp.co.uk
www.netfury.co.uk
www.uk-internet-access.co.uk.

they handle thousands of simultaneous connections but the nature of
the transactions is that they are very small.
It's very well understood and well balanced for its' task