i was just curious if Arn or whoever hosts macrumors themselve, or do you pay someone else to host?
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who hosts macrumors?
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In general, only the very smallest and very largest of sites will be entirely hosted by the owner without a third party hosting company being paid in some way. MacRumors uses 4 dedicated servers hosted by one of the large providers in the US.
In order to get the reliability and bandwidth required for a site of this size it is pretty much guaranteed that it is hosted in a data centre.
Only big business that can afford to have their own secure, fire proof, back up power systems, flood proof what have you would think about hosting a large website themselves.
There is a lot more to hosting than just sticking Apache on a computer
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thanks guys. i was just curious. i actually am working in a data center now as a co-op, so i'm kinda interested in stuff like this.
Why 4, are they co-located for redundant data security? What about the live WWDC feeds, is there extra capacity from an additional temporary servers set up with higher thoroughput? Just curious how that is handled. I remember akaima(sp?) or whatever it's called, hosted one of the 1st live streaming vids of was it MWNY, and the bandwidth needed was not nearly enough, just stalled-out the vid stream.
Tis a pity that the biggest volume Mac enthusiast site cannot find an competitive Apple expertise server company using Xserves to run this site from
Tidbits.com has always managed to stay on Mac servers from the very beggining.
http://www.tidbits.com/about/in-use.html
Capacity more than redundancy. We've gradually added and upgraded servers as the traffic to the site has increased.
Yes, we add considerable extra capacity for the live feeds - 5 additional dedicated servers, lots of Amazon EC2 virtual servers plus Amazon S3 and Cachefly CDNs. In this case, it is both for capacity and redundancy.
Akamai has handled all of Apple's video feeds, and still does all the video streaming, trailers and most of the images on the site (e.g. images.apple.com is actually Akamai). They've got a massive network, but I don't envy their job when it comes to live streaming - 100s of thousands of simultaneous visitors is tricky enough for simple text, never mind broadband video.
Tis a pity that the biggest volume Mac enthusiast site cannot find an competitive Apple expertise server company using Xserves to run this site from
Xserves are comparatively high end servers so unless there's something specifically in OS X you need they tend not to be used for sites that have only just grown enough to justify a dedicated server. Unfortunately it's just easier to stick with what the site has run on so far when upgrading, so sites don't tend to want to move OS when they've grown enough to justify a server at the level of the Xserve.