Thanks - this is useful. I will check out the Causes app.Any ideas on what this kind of setup might cost? Would an ad-network targeted at facebook apps need this much hardware or less - or more even? I have no idea.
Sorry for the late reply. So Causes received about $1.25M in funding, and they only have about five engineers I think. The hardward is always the lowest cost. With an ad network, that will be quite a lot actually especially if you plan to scale to every app imaginable. According to many of those in the top 3% and 1% of facebook apps, it's fairly data intensive, but I think you can scale this pretty easily. I'd start with a smaller amount first and then just scale up with a managed hosting service.
