I have been designed and implemented two large scale web sites. MyGrowUp.com is the latest one. Here I would like to share the secrets of how to build a large web site which uses 100% open source solutions and can scale up to hundreds millions of user subscriptions. Here are 10 things I am going to talk about:
1. Can I build a large web site with all free open source programs? what is "The Gang of Four" open source architecture?
2. How to scale your database so you can easily add more database servers to serve increasing subscribers.
3. What is the best open source cache solution to maximize database server performance
4. How to store tera bytes of multimedia files by adding cheap file servers dynamically.
5. How to load balance your web applications so you can easily add more web servers to serve billions of requests
6. What are other open sources that are necessary for a large website such as Video convert and streaming, server healthy monitor etc
7. What is the best solutions for hosting your web site (If your funding is limited, never go to big hosting company such as RackSpace, also never host by yourself)
8. How to make your web site known to mass without spending big marketing money
9. How to use Javascripts to design some fancy web 2.0 interface (such as those used in MyGrowUp.com)
10. How to integrate your service into Facebook F8 platform
Addition: How to implement a small web site for your business
Internet provides the best foundation to anyone who got a good idea and can put it into success without having funding from venture capital. I benefit from it and I would like others to share it.
Here I will talk about question 1 in the list. I will get motivation to continues on question 2 to 10 next time if there are many diggs on this article. Besides, I do not have complete answer on some item such as Facebook integration because I am still working on it.
1. Can I build a large web site with all free open source programs? what is "The Gang of Four" open source architecture?
Yes, 100% yes. You can build a large and reliable web site without paying a penny on software. The phrase "The Gang of Four" is another term for the popular LAMP (or LAMJ, so I called): Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php/Pearl (or Java). People may ask - are they reliable? I do not want to spend long writing to answer this question. Here I just give some well known web site I know which used these programs:
1. Linux: Even big enterprise such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs used Linux as production servers
2. Apache Tomcat: Walmart is one of the largest online shopping site, its massive web servers are based on Apache Tomcat
3. MySQL: A lot of Goolge, Yahoo services are using MySQL, others include MyGrowUp, Digg, Facebook and more.
4. Php, Java: too many to list here.
Please digg.