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General Discussion

Posted by Joshua Brown
Joshua Brown
9,683 Points

Web Application Hosting?

Howdy

I'm working on a large web application project, essentially it tracks social media accounts. Therefore it's going to be doing a lot of crawling we're talking 1000's of accounts over various networks. It's something a lot bigger than what I've worked on before and am going to need a separate host to serve it on. I'm thinking it needs to be scalable in case we add more accounts or open it up to other people to track accounts. I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for hosting such an application. What is treehouse hosted on?

Thanks!

5 Answers

Patrik Christoffersson
Patrik Christoffersson
2,679 Points
Patrik Christoffersson
Patrik Christoffersson
2,679 Points

Calculate, and calculate.

Are you going to store users pictures? How mutch traffic do you think the site will have? etc, etc.

Id suggest an dedicated server with an good connection. I dont know how you are going to store everything.

Joshua Brown
Joshua Brown
9,683 Points
Joshua Brown
Joshua Brown
9,683 Points

The largest part is going to be the database, theres not going to be much storage of media like pictures, mostly we're going to be gathering information from networks like Facebook and Twitter, calculating likes and some additional metrics from various statistics from those networks.

I'm working at an agency who want to be able to grab this information calculate some metrics so we can analyse the data for clients and this is just the first tool in our suite we are developing.

I've been looking at Amazon Web Services, I know a lot of the big guys such as Dropbox use them, how do they scale in terms of cost for start ups?

Ismael G Marin C
Ismael G Marin C
2,142 Points
Ismael G Marin C
Ismael G Marin C
2,142 Points

It's great, but it's nos as easy to use, there are several options:

Heroku: is amazing, as very easy to use, but a little bit expensive, but for many startups this is the intial step to follow (similar options: appfog.com)

The new kid on the block but with great results is DigitalOcean.

Is your app rails? node?

Ernest Grzybowski
Ernest Grzybowski
Treehouse Project Reviewer
Ernest Grzybowski
Ernest Grzybowski
Treehouse Project Reviewer

Rackspace cloud hosting is pretty clutch. I've put out some very very user heavy applications for not too much money.

John Wheal
John Wheal
27,969 Points
John Wheal
John Wheal
27,969 Points

I would use Amazon Web Services. I think Treehouse also uses them. They are pay as you go and can scale as large as required. They aren't very easy to get started, you need to think about making the site highly available by having backup servers running in separate availability zones.

I recently wrote this article which explains what they can offer: http://mytechblog.com/2013/01/aws-services/