I need to know the costs involved in setting up a high-traffic site

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
lancsDavid's picture

I'm a Drupal developer and need to know what it costs to set up a high-traffic site (I'll be outsourcing this part of the build). Together with a pretty detailed breakdown of the costs for the different aspects of the build.

(ie: memcache costs £X to setup, Amazon S3 costs £Y to setup & maintain for N gigabytes per month)

Its a website for a large UK town and I need to be able to say to the client "Option A - with N hits per week - will cost £X, Option B - with M hits per week - will cost £Y, etc". Without this I can't pitch the idea to the client without sounding like a chump when they ask me how much it'll cost & I say "I don't know".

Anyway, if anyone can recommend a bunch of links I can follow to find out this information - or just some advice - I'll be very grateful.

David

Comments

@David

omega8cc's picture

It's easy to build a Drupal based monster (I mean its monthly HIGH cost).
It's also fairly easy to build powerful and low cost setup - when you know a how-to.

Before looking for memcache and Amazon cloud etc. we have to know some estimated numbers for:

  1. Anticipated logged in simultaneous users.
  2. Anticipated monthly traffic in GB.
  3. Anticipated daily page views.

When you know the answers to above 3 questions, or at least you can anticipate it will be something between X and Y, then it will be easy to answer what power (servers resources and Drupal tools) you need and how much it will cost you, when hosted in datacenter A, B, C, D or E.

~Grace -- Turnkey Drupal Hosting on Steroids -- http://omega8.cc

Memcached doesn't cost a dime

fgm@drupal.org's picture

In addition to what omega8cc said, note that you can very well deploy memcached on any cheap VPS.

The downside is that is might not do you much good if it doesn't fit your actual use case and/or you don't tune it : default config is just useless.

ok. (very) vague estimates

lancsDavid's picture

the site is for a UK town of population 150,000. theres no precedent for the kind of site it is (as far as i know), but its a community art site, so theres probably going to be a lot of images and some videos. { though regarding videos, if - say - £20,000 / USD$30,000 (total funding) for the site means video must be hosted on youtube then so be it }

as for anticipated daily page views, if the site is really popular maybe 20% of the town might check it out daily. or if its wildly popular maybe 150,000 page views a day (including people from outside)

monthly traffic? whatever is average for a fairly image-rich site for this number of page views

its not going to involve e-commerce (at least not at first), will require organic groups, won't involve much custom module creation (i'll try to make creative use of what already exists), & will require some theming (probably with a Zen sub-theme cos its supposed to be easier)

its really a site to showcase community art & use OG to help people work together on various projects. though, because of its nature it concerns me that it might become an overnight success & thus cripple itself because of high traffic. so, any thoughts on what might be required to alleviate this if it does happen would be appreciated

i will probably try & leverage the drupal development community for assistance in creating it if i can. but some things are just gonna have to be forked out for, like hardware, bandwidth, (some) development costs, etc

so would £20,000 / USD$30,000 total cost be a totally unreasonable ask for the client, i'm wondering?

@David

omega8cc's picture

If they don't need permission control on images and video display, then I would recommend to use integrated YouTube for video and integrated Flickr for images. Now you can mark the traffic monthly cost as "included".

It seems Open Atrium http://openatrium.com could be a good start to build it (showcase community art & use OG to help people work together on various projects).

If you will use a good base - Project Mercury http://groups.drupal.org/node/25065 is a good example - then you should be able to run this website on a single VPS with 2-4 GB of RAM.

Honestly, I don't know how to match this with £20,000 / USD$30,000 total cost. Maybe it's related to my obsession on making Drupal running FAST even on low-end, cheap VPS :-)

~Grace -- Turnkey Drupal Hosting on Steroids -- http://omega8.cc

thanks

lancsDavid's picture

ok. cheers for your help

hopefully i'll get a feel for costing if i continue to plough through drupal.org's case studies