I have a social networking site which is almost ready. On the site people would upload images and put information about themselves for their profile and would also post messages (which can include images). I am wondering exactly how to proceed (hosting, servers etc.), I am a relative beginner at all this stuff so I am not sure exactly what route to take. I am thinking of maybe hosting from home initially from my Personal Computer and maybe expand by acquiring servers to stack (which I am not exactly sure how to do honestly) if we grow. Since the site is aimed at a small proportion of the population, I am not expecting huge growth in traffic but I want to be prepared for spikes, albeit small ones. I was wondering if maybe it is possible to just host it off my computer and store the the database (MySQL) in a removable disk along with the images. I was also thinking about cloud hosting, which seems to be the most common, but I was wondering if that really is the best thing to do, given this is a social networking site.
I know this question is very vague and broad, but since I am a beginner I really have no clue how to proceed. What is the best thing to do?
Thank you so much!
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Casey Neistat
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Hosting from personal computers is a bad idea for few reasons - your internet bandwidth limits the speed of the website, you need to maintain 24/7 interest connectivity/ power and all the resources.
I suggest you to start with AWS, get a free account of AWS, which comes with a basic level machine free for 12 months, more details here (https://aws.amazon.com/activate/).
- Deploy a machine in EC2,
- Install the webserver and MySQL tools into the machine
- Host your files in this machine.
- Refer this machine public ip to your domain service provider(where you bought your domain. Example: Godaddy)
Deploying a machine and configuring the server takes a while, but its worth, it and the best part is its FREE for 12 months, so you need not worry about the pricing, connectivity and bandwidth.
Also when you think the traffic is more, you can upgrade your server with few clicks with no config changes.
rrmerugu
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@yellowantphil answer or the question ? – rrmerugu Apr 09 '17 at 18:12
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The answer. You’re surprisingly enthusiastic about AWS. – yellowantphil Apr 09 '17 at 18:12
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Yes I'm, but what makes it spam, i'm not associated with AWS – rrmerugu Apr 09 '17 at 18:13
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Do you mean my answer is promoting AWS and it could be treated as spam ? – rrmerugu Apr 09 '17 at 18:14
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I am not sure about site rules on that sort of thing. In any case, I’m not going to flag this answer or anything like that. – yellowantphil Apr 09 '17 at 18:15
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@rrmerugu Thank you. Yes I think I might do this. – Casey Neistat Apr 09 '17 at 18:16
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@yellowantphil cool. surprisingly even I was asked for bot verification, when I posted this answer, which never happened to me before. I think I need to check the site rules about this . Thanks for your suggestion . – rrmerugu Apr 09 '17 at 18:19