Ideal TGP Server Setup - Your Ideas

3 servers to run a single TGP sounds unusual, unless it had a shitload of traffic. Otherwise, that solution is either extremely overengineered, or necessary because the scripts are doing something to cause excessive load.

my tgp runs on a server with 2400 other sites on the same IP

but I certainly dont have boneprone's traffic.

IMO with 2 servers the SQL should have its own

I just realized how stupid it was to use that number. I knew it was off but at 5am I don't care much.

2400 is the number of servers on the external IP address. I'll assume they run a NAT (laymen: a network of computers) and so I don't know how many sites are hosted on the same machine... BUT I know it's not alone. And that was my point.

Even a 100k tgp can run fine on a single dedicated machine.

Which hosts use NAT on web servers?

I expect it will become commonplace as the IP registries crack down on flagrant allocations (eg people paying $1/IP/mo so they can put their 30 sites on a single IP each) but I haven't actually seen it in practice yet...

Bingo!

don't know, but

http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/ type in sexyoptions.com

and my host is aplus.net

Ah, that's just a standard virtual web server then. It's possible that there really are 2400 sites served by that machine, although it may involve some extra magic such as attached network storage.

All sort of depends on what kind of traffic. Add to it, what you want to do, pics, videos etc. one machine can do great, and then again 3 machines can be too little. You need something tailored to your needs.

We are moving things into less servers with the newer high powered servers as we speak.

As for load balancing it all depends on your amount of trafic and the scripts you run.

In my case I have to split things up. Also some of the larger thumbsites do as well. I dont want to give away their secrets down to the last detial, but its no secret now days that they split shit up..

People have been doing this for years. Thumbzilla's old owners were masters of this. And they didnt even really have thumbs or graphics!

Most hosts or techs at the hosting companies will try to tell you its not needed. But trust me it is. Myseld along with other webmasters have seen significant % changes in traffic when its done. Most programers of these scripts will agree.

But now days the servers are quite strong. You can put more in them than you ever could. And you can spilt them up in seprate HDs rather than seprate servers

It really depends on what software you'll be using, but with a well configured server I don't think separate machines are necessary. You'd have to have either a shitload of traffic (thehun sized or something like that) or scripts that aren't supposed to handle lots of traffic.

Having a dedicated webserver for thumbs makes sense, as does splitting request across multiple subdomains, but you can do this on a single server as long as it has enough power to handle it.

So, unless MySQL or resource intensive PHP scripts eat up your CPU or I/O you could do something like this: Apache to deliver your regular website, on a second IP address Lighttpd or Apache (MPM worker instead of prefork) for thumb-delivery, possibly using multiple subdomains so your average browser makes more simultaneous request, MySQL chugging along in the background.

Todays server with something like 4-16 CPU cores and tons of RAM can handle quite a lot if you know what you're doing, but it really depends on what exactly you want to do.