Pingdom recently ran a survey of 7 massive sites to see what they used behind the firewall.

I find a lot of this fascinating. For example, that TechCrunch only runs on 2 servers. I’d be scared crapless of running what is effectively a million-dollar/year business on anything less than 5 servers (2 web, 2 DB, 1 other) for fear that it’d go down. I mean, if you’re doing a million dollars a year in revenue, then every hour of downtime costs you about 150$. To me, a handful of servers is worth it to alleviate that risk.

By and large, though, most of these larger sites:

1. Run on Apache, PHP and MySQL
2. Use clustering of the webservers and database servers to avoid downtime
3. Most would seem to prefer to scale the hardware vs tuning extensively

Personally I think it’d be fantastically interesting to see how other blog media companies structure their server infrastructure. Not just blog networks, but companies like 9rules and such as well. Not to say “oh we’re better” (I’m an old school enterprise IT guy, so our server infrastructure is almost overkill), but just because we all face such similar challenges and looking at how everyone solves those challenges would probably mean everyone would learn a bit.

I’ve pinged David Krug at 901am to see if he’s interested in doing this (as I think having an impartial person run it would be better than one of the blog media companies). We’ll see if he answers.

Even if nobody else is game, I might ping Aaron later on this week to see if he wants to effectively do a version of the Pingdom survey based on b5′s infrastructure (to give a view into what runs the network).

Of course the irony of this is that we got absolutely slammed traffic-wise today (a dozen different things happened, and we went 50% over our capacity (which has 50% spare capacity vs what we normally use) and were down for an hour or two. I figure if you’re going to go down, going down because an extra few hundred thousand folk are trying to hit the sites is a pretty good reason ;-)

I’m not sure Aaron found it as entertaining as I did when the network went down. Which is good, since it’s his job to keep it up, heh.