Do I go cloud or managed? I will need this thing to host tons of media-rich content, and most importantly host our mobile apps.
Oh, and I know that this kind of a wild guess question, but mobile social networking apps that are heavy on images and video for example, for say 500,000 users what would you guys say your wild guess would be, for the monthly hosting bill? Just a ballpark. Or similarly, approximately how many users of say Instagram could you host per each $1000/mo spent on hosting?
You could go cloud and managed. Or cloud and un-mananged. Or non-cloud and managed. Or non-cloud and un-managed.
Cloud hosting is just a method of computing. It's essentially a way of providing redundancy and ease of access. For instance, if you get a 'cloud' based virtual server, it can still be unmanaged. The hosting company will provide you with a dedicated virtual server hosted on the cloud, but it's all yours to manage once you get logged in. Even though it's hosted on the cloud, the provider may still bill you for tech support related to everyday tasks such as adding users, chasing/cleaning viruses, etc.
I could provide you with a dedicated physical server, such as a dual quad core Xeon system with 4GB of ram and 200GB of hard drives in a raid1. Or I could provide you with a dedicated virtual server, hosted on the cloud, and still give you dual quad core speeds with 4GB of ram and 200GB of hard drive space. I could install Windows Server on each one, and when you remote in, you could barely tell the difference. The catch is, the dedicated physical server is a bare metal install, and if that server dies, unless you have backups, you need to reinstall and start from scratch. On the other hand, the dedicated virtual server is hosted on 'the cloud' which employs many redundancies. For instance, our vmWare cloud servers enjoy High Availability, Fault Tolerance, High Speed redundant NAS Storage (15krpm sas drives in Raid6), etc.
Also, it's going to be a completely useless shot in the dark to ask how many users you can support with $X amount of money. There are so many factors involved that it's almost impossible to calculate.
First, you could spend $300 on a server and the rest ($700) on bandwidth. What if that gets you plenty of bandwidth but the server can't cut it? Or what if you spend $700 on a server, but you don't buy enough bandwidth to keep up?
Hosting companies are going to have different pricing structures. You might find that one company charges more for a server, but less for bandwidth. Or vice versa.
How do you calculate how much load each 'user' puts on the system? What factors are involved with the calcuation of 'load'? CPU utilization? How much storage space they take up? How much bandwidth they consume? Are all users going to have similar usage patterns?
500 users could post pics that get little traffic. 1 user could post something that gets on reddit and uses more resources (bandwidth, cpu utilization) than all the first 500 users combined.
500 users could post a few pics that use very little storage. 1 user could post as many as he possible can using up twice as much storage as the first 500 users combined.
Or we could launch similar sites. However, my 100 users might use more resources than 2000 of your users.
Keep all of this in mind. Reply to my PM if you want to talk through this.
