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Boris Guéry
Asked: 2009-09-23 03:24:37 +0800 CST

How to set up an event website?

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For my work, I need to set up an event website. The site will be up to 2 or 3 months during the campaign.

The site needs to be stable and have high availability, especially during the rush hours.

The site will probably not make use of server side scripts or databases, but it will contain animated flash content.

The visitors will come on the website directly by typing the url (from printed ads) and from web ads on high traffic websites (journals).

  • How do you handle this kind of set up?
  • How do you estimate the traffic?
  • How do you use this estimation to set up apache and which options will vary?
  • Is there something else I need to think about?

Thank you.

I've some basic skills with apache confs, but I never had to set up such website. Btw, I am a programmer not a sysadmin.

apache-2.2

3 Answers

  1. consider:

    • outsourcing it

    or

    • do it in-house, but do it well. ensure you have redundant internet connection, redundant hardware. instead of apache use one of agile webservers: lighthttpd or mathopd - they will handle high traffic much better.

    i assume you'll be facing tens of requests per second or more. if you expect to have few views per minute - apache will be fine.

    ps. as bgy suggests nginx can be also good alternative for apache.

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  2. How many visitors do you expect? 10, 10.000 or 10 milion! This makes a huge difference in whatever options you may have. For anything below 1000 at the same time. One server will do. But showing Flash will make it heavy on bandwith.

    Ask your internet/hosting provider about options. Usually they have setups for these kinds of questions.

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  3. Just a few thoughts about it - ignoring the outsourcing thingy :)

    • Use a loadbalancer (like pen or something) rather than DNS-RR. If you need to add more servers, it can be done in no time. No need for a lot of IPs and low DNS-TTLs.
    • Use a shared storage like iSCSI or NFS (look at FreeNAS). Same contents on all servers.
    • Enable compression for text files
    • Force static contents to be served via HTTP 1.0 rather than 1.1
    • Pull images and other static stuff from a separate server (-farm)
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