[consulting] Drupal server requirements

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Sun, 2006-03-26 at 13:59 -0500, Clara Hurst wrote:
> Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> > Clara Hurst wrote:
> >
> >> We are writing a proposal for a client site with potential of  
> >> 100,000 unique visitors per months.  The registered site users can be 
> >> ranging from a few thousands to 10,000.   However, we expect at any 
> >> given time there might be only up to a couple hundreds active users 
> >> logged in,
> >
> >
> > You mean they actually logged in and do something or there is just an 
> > active session hanging around in the database? This is a major 
> > difference.
> 
> We do  need to prepare the situation where there are couple 100s active 
> sessions that are actually doing something. Although it is hard to 
> predict what's  really going to happen, as their currently site (none 
> drupal) user activities are fairly low so we don't want to over engineer 
> it  - to scare the client away ;-), yet hope that we can have a platform 
> that they can grow.  Being a consulting firm  we would like to provide a 
> few pricing options so the client can choose their comfort-zone to 
> invest,  yet have a clear understanding of what to expect etc.

My normal approach to selling a customer that may or may not be a high
volume customer is to go in with an upgrade path in mind.  Like we'll
start on a single server, and then be ready to split off the DB when
necessary. You may also arrange with your upstream or colo provider to
lease a second server for the initial launch and begin with a split web
server / db server configuration, and consolidate if the project doesn't
need the resources, or expand if it does.