Lightweight Models, Oh-my!

Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability, Oh-my!

It might seem like a quest to have the best of everything but Lightweight Models & Cost-Effective Scalability isn’t that mythical. You don’t have to battle the the wicked witches, but that doesn’t say it is a simple path to take either.

So lets talk about an example that exists out there already:

Wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org

We all know what Wikipedia is but in case you missed it (perhaps your just starting to use a computer?), Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia that is based on an openly=editable model. It allows users to add articles/pages and also edit existing ones in a self organising way.

So lets take a look at some stats and see how large Wikipedia is, bear in mind this is only the English side of Wikipedia and doesn’t count for other languages.

I’ve also put together a more visual representation taken from the wiki stats page, Click to enlarge the view!

So there is no doubt that Wikipedia is large, and they have use an Open Source, Scalable solution across multiple servers, multiple countries, etc. All with less than 30 staff members dedicated staff members. Of course you don’t have to be as large as wikipedia to use the software and there are in fact many smaller sites that use the same software. You might not have the large economies of scale either, and that doesn’t matter because there are effective solutions out there.

Enter LAMP, a solution stack of open source software that is ready to take on your needs. LAMP is actually an acronym (not a light stand) that represents the key open source software packages.

Linux – An operating system
Apache – A HTTP web server
MySQL – Database software
PHP – A language in which you can code web pages

LAMP allows you set up and host your own site with ease, it is scalable and as for the cost effect side – it is Open Source. I’ve heard lots of rumours but I haven’t been able to find any ‘hard facts’, but major sites like Facebook and Flicr are based on LAMP, or at least were at some stage. I could say my site is based on a LAMP distro to also make a point (but it isn’t), however there is nothing stopping you from starting your own site and doing so.

The next biggest craze though is cloud-computing and business creating their sites of API’s, and renting CPU power from Google, while hosting data on Amazon S3, etc. The reason I avoided this is because it is very much on the hype cycle and I don’t feel comfortable not having that much control. This might be changing (and it looks so), but it is hard to recommend outsourcing a solution when you can get started yourself easily with LAMP!