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Scalable cloud solution for startup web application
Hello,
I am running a startup and we are developing a web application for football addicted (developed in PHP Laravel + MySql). We plan to have 1000 users subscribed in the first year and lets say 500 can use the app at the same time. Most of the operations are database related (CRUD operations on database).
My questions are: what cloud service (at a reasonable prices, being this a startup) shall I use in order to easy scale when we go above 1000 users? what kind of minimum resources do you think I would need at the beginning?
I heard about Linode, DigitalOcean, Heroku, Amazon AWS..
Thanks
Comments
Depends what your budget is. Application scalability is way more important than being able to scale a "cloud" vps up and down.
Make sure you can run on 1 or 100 servers, and spread between different services if possible. Remember, the "cloud" is 90% marketing BS unless done properly.
My budget is $150 per month the fist year for a MVP and 1000 users. I am planning to put the database and application on one server and all the media files (images and so on) on a different server (or cloudflare CDN service).
You've listed three wildly different types of service options.
DO - sell cheap VPS
)
Heroku sell vastly overpriced 'platform' as a service (a fancy word for shared hosting
AWS is a cloud 'ecosystem' that's pretty complex (and quite costly)
What kind of architecture are you planning at this point? If a single n-tier (loadbalancers, web servers, app servers and DB servers) then your budget is probably ok for a moderate level of resources and getting your architecture right.
So, look for a cloud that will give you those layers, ideally a gigabit private LAN between servers, SSD storage and flexibility to deploy the configs you need.
I will adopt a single n-tier architecture so I should be fine at the beginning and I could scale easily. What kind of provider do you suggest?
We're not generally LET prices, but if you want a pure enterprise SSD cloud that gives you HA, real cloud scaling and private networking, we've a lot of experience with your kind of solution.
Otherwise rackspace, firehost and a few others would meet the bill
The hardest thing to scale is your database, so keep that in mind as you go along. Also, try to keep your application as stateless as possible. For example, don't use the local filesystem as a cache, and make any memcached/Redis/whatever settings easily-configurable.
Solutions that offer load balancers (like AWS and GCE) are easiest to scale with, but you can get by with home-grown solutions if you're willing to put in the extra work.
We have both PAAS and Cloud services, please PM me so we can discuss your requirements.
By the sounds of things one of our PAAS offerings would probably be best then you can just leave the platform to handle the scaling.
@ledzgio We can offer you HA pay as you grow system. Feel free to contact me. We have great experience with big web apps and we can offer some level of consulting for free.
Best regards
Which brand do you offer HA services under?
On any brand that you wish. All our nodes are Remus capable. Same vlan is only limit at the moment
Most Clouds are rather expensive when you need a lot of resources. Cloud is good if you, let's say, have 1 user now, and want to have 10,000 tomorrow, and then after a week you want again have only 1 user. But if you don't have such spikes, e.g. if you have 100 users now, will have 200 next month, 300 after 2 months - it should be cheaper to use fixed servers.
If your application developed correctly, 500 users per second can be served on one lowend dedicated server for 70$ per month.
I think two servers for 50-70$ per month should be file. One - main. Second - backup (automatically switch in case of trouble with main). In case if your number of users will scale very much, it's possible to set up MySQL cluster using few dedicated servers. But cluster solutions should be done with vrack-connected servers and this is a bit more pricey solution (at least 120$ per server, and some sysadmin job is required).
Anyway it requires a deep overview of your application and load testing. I am usually dealing with high-loaded MySQL databases, if you are searching for sysadmin - let me know.
After reading your messages I think I can set my architecture as follow:
This way I can add a new server and put the database there (if necessary I can set a distributed database), add a new server for caching with redis and so on. I would like to replicate also the application itself, so if one server is down, I can still serve my clients..any idea?
Since you mentioned PHP and scalability - www.fortrabbit.com
@ledzgio - we can either provide you with dedicated servers very cheaply which you can then take the disks and upgrade the server or as mentioned in my PM, depending on your application I can get you onto our PAAS service.
Also try PagodaBox for a PHP PaaS
@MarkTurner why do you always spam few times in each topic? You either offer your services with text and spam with your signature. It's come to be annoying to see this in every topic.
@Profforg - not spamming, the OP was interested in PAAS and PM'ed me; then followed up with dedicated servers. Both points were relevant to the OP's request.