
Where/How are you hosting your Facebook App? - djworth

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kirse
I have an app (Fast Friends -- originally Top Nine) with 125,000 users and
absolutely no problems hosting -- I'm actually running two apps off the same
server. I'm sure if I had won the user war against Slide I'd need a dedicated
server ;)

Unless you have a media intensive application (ex: video, music, etc...),
hosting isn't really _that_ bad. I would venture to guess apps like "X Me" and
"SuperPoke" would do with a single powerful dedicated server, since theres
really not much going on. Also, Facebook hosts the images on any profile, so
any bandwidth there is only needed until their proxy server picks up the
image.

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drusenko
yeah, if hosting is a big problem for you, and you're legitimately optimized
right, then email about anyone in the valley -- you can get a bridge loan
(convertible note) for $20k - $50k in no time (less than 5 days). if you don't
know anybody, email me. go to any investor and say "I need money because my
site is growing too fast!" and you're solid. end result: hosting is not
actually a problem (even though it looks like one), but making a popular app
is much more of a problem.

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sajidu
This is a hard problem.

If your app isn't successful then there's nothing to worry about.

But what if your app is super successful? How would you ever be able to secure
enough servers to meet the demand without burning a very deep hole in your
pocket?

What we need is a Y-Combinator like incubator for Facebook Apps - a company
which will host your app and help you scale it up for a chunk of equity.

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djworth
I think EC2 ( <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2> ) is a pretty good way to go but I'm
interested in what others are thinking.

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lizherring
EC2 is not suitable for most Web applications:

\- You don't get a static IP address, so if your instance fails and needs to
reboot, you might end up with a different IP address.

\- If your instance fails, it also loses all the data stored in it.

\- There is no hardware load balancing.

With that said, you can probably use it to complement your other servers by
doing some of the batch processing.

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yubrew
If your site gets big, ask someone to host it for you (30boxes hosted one of
the most popular apps). You can sell it to RockYou or Slide if it gets too
popular. IMO, not a real concern, and when you reach this point, then you will
think of some solution.

For now, worry about the real issue: "What is a problem that I can relate to
and solve for Facebook users?"

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britman
I'm using Slicehost. So far so good, although my app is small fry in the
traffic stakes.

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aaroneous
My company loaned servers to one of the top 10 Facebook apps for a few weeks
as their app grew to over 3.5MM users.

The hardware: Two modestly equipped boxes from ServerBeach.com -- and it ran
super smooth.

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sbraford
A VPS at the moment, while it's still being developed.

