anyone heard of round-robin DNS ?
you don't have to pay anything, and you will have your site without any ads, the solution is simple :
take ~50 members with proper upload bandwidth (500-1000 kbits) give everyone a copy of the static data and give them the web server configurations and proper settings to make sure they are all the same, make sure that those members have a constant ip address, and make sure they agree to keep the web stuff running in their system, always.
once that is achieved, a DNS company could create you a DNS name, which would be a round-robin DNS address, which will transfer every next hit to the next ip address of on e these members, for example :
a user entering the DNS address which will connect him to 0.0.0.1 (address doesn't matter they must be the addresses of the members)
the next user entering the site will be using the same DNS address but will actually connect to 0.0.0.2 (member #2)
and so forth.
the web data must be as static as possible, the changed data which is modified all the time like the forum content (SQL) will be on the master server, to which all members will connect and linked to transfer the rest of the data.
problems : the members will have to have tolerable latency to the server, 50-100 ms is optimal, the server to which they will be connecting must have the ip addresses of these members in the iptables as ALLOWED, and give them specific usernames and passwords for access, should not be a problem.
this will greatly reduce server cpu load as it will only have to deal with sql and no http and scripting stuff which require much more cpu time.
those members will have to have their network stuff running ALL the time, that means no shutting down of the system, at all.
as a backup, the round-robin DNS will have to provide a fail-safe against ip addresses that do not reply in sufficient amount of time and make sure to skip those addresses when they fail, to avoid users getting an error which would indicate that their site does not exist while in fact it's that partocular member to which that particular user was assigned to at this particular time.
since many people here are programmers im sure you understand the idea quite well.
of corse, it is also possible to make a more sinple and elegant solution :
you could make a master site with mirrors, same thing, the mirror sites will contain all site content and connect to the master site for data modification, the master site will not contain anything but a selection, in plain HTML, of all the other mirrors (users with web stuff running that can host all the web data as mentioned above).
with both of these methods, you can either have a very low load on the main server of even manage very well without a server at all, using only the administrator's system as the host for SQL requests (which will have to make sure his system never gets shut down either, because if it does it will no longer be possible to modify any data)
what do you think of this idea ? is it helpful ?
