I finished developing a website that I picked up by using the myTino Search Engine but I don’t know the exact size the server must be. This is a social network for my school and each user can open an account and upload pictures but I don’t know how much server space I need to support this or what I should focus on. Can somebody help me?

Hi,

This is a question that many web developers face these days with the advent of social networking sites or sites which contain user contributed content.

My advice to you is to start small, but with a predicted measure of the type of content you are expecting your visitors to generate. Don't try to be FaceBook from the start- its' pointless and you'll spend a lot of money in the beginning which may be wasted if the site is under utilised. Look at hosts who provide a flexible non-destructive package upgrade system. Dreamhost might be a good option initially since they have a wide range of packages and their offers are usually very generous to begin with.

Once setup, be rigid in evaluating your traffic and growth, then you can do migrations to larger setups as time goes on.

To predict how much space to allocate initially, take your upload limit per photo (maybe ~250kb?), and multiply that by what you envisage the average number of photos a visitor will upload (maybe about 40?) (I checked Facebook to see what the average number of photos my friends have uploaded over the past 6 months and it's roughly 30), then mulitply that by your registered visitors (if you have none, then take the predicted registrations per day initially (~12? (1 every two hours?)) over a 3 month period (12 x 90 days = 1080 users in 3 months!)

So: 250kb x 40 photos (x 40 thumbnails @ quarter size (60kb)) x 1080 users = about 13 gigabytes, so 20gb is going to be good to start with. Don't forget to factor in log files though.

Hope that helps,

Gav

thank you Gav,your advices are useful to me!i;ll think of that carefully and then decide how to do next!
thank you again!