Building a Web Server, Cry for Help
by John Seo
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Recently, the traffic to VersaGlobe has been increasing at a rapid clip and our web traffic at peak times is beginning to overload our server. This leads to an interesting project, building a custom web server or servers capable of hundreds of thousands of hits daily. This server must also be able to handle video and program downloads, but mostly static content. So we set out in search of a server configuration up to the task. We welcome anyone with any know how to post on the forum with suggestions.

I began by looking at the commercially available options through dell. It seems I can build a dual quad core Xeon machine with a terabyte of disk space running 8 gigs of ram and raid 5 for about $4,000. While this is an option, I believe we can get a server and a load balancer for that price. We can then use our existing server and load balance between the two. Also, by building it ourselves, we will be saving about $2,000. We are the "do it yourself" generation. Next stop www.directron.com.

At directron we can get two quad core AMD 2.0GHz Operons for $544. Two fans at $67 a piece totaling $134. A Tyan motherboard for $445. Four sticks of dual channel 667 OCZ memory totaling 8GB for $170. Four Toshiba SATA 250GB hard drives for $340. A LG DVD drive for $16. An Antec 650W power supply for $60. And to finish it off, a black CompuCase for $65. This brings our grand total to $1434. This leaves us plenty of room to shop around for a load balancer.

When Googling load balancer, there is an add that comes up first for Barracuda Load Balancers. They start at $1,500. I can't imagine needing much more than the basics here. This hardware basically works like a router, but will serve web requests to the servers based on their availability. This should help when two people decide to download the same piece of software simultaneously. Now that we officially have two servers sending out the same information, we have a server farm.

Now, since our total is only $2,934, I think it best to pitch in for another of those dual quad core servers bringing the total to $4,368. Two servers and a load balancer for the price of one Dell server. After the hardware bottleneck has been taken care of, we can look into bandwidth options. We currently have a 4Gb fiber optic connection. This is clearly a point of error, but I've heard that they are coming out with a new high bandwidth option. I'm not sure what throughput it will have, but it likely won't match that of a T3.

This brings us to the possibility of using a colo. or collocation for housing our server farm. While this seems like a logical next step it runs into the problem of requiring constant travel to replace hard drives and do maintenance.

This is my first attempt to build a web server. If anyone has any tips or comments on my design, I'de be very happy to see your posts on the VersaGlobe forum. Now we begin our quest to serve hundreds of thousands of visits, with zero downtime.