I'm planning to host a website. It would be a photo-sharing website. I'm trying to find out a server that I should buy to put the website online.
- The website is in Apache PHP.
- I'm assuming the number of users as 10,000 and 1000 are uploading the photos of average 1 MB.
- I'm assuming that this number, 10,000 will reach by the end of second year.
- I have multiple (5 to 7) DB servers(software) running and I'm planning to put all the DB's on one machine only. (Things do work for one user in laptop ;) )
- I'm using postgresql as my DB
Now, I'm looking for a (Dell T110 or R310 kinda) server that should be able to handle the HTTP requests properly. But I do not know
- Is 10,000 a big number of users, or if it may go more than expected
- Is it right decision to think of Buying a Server of my own instead of hosting it over a cloud or VPS
- Do I need to think of failover nodes, Load balancing for 10,000 users. (I'll keep a backup of DB and photos)
Please do let me know if question is very vague. I would be highly grateful if you could tell me the assumptions are totally dumb and provide me some pointers/hints.