Database driven websites - How well do they hold up?

[sevenhelmets]

Lately I've been building my websites as database driven - running mySQL and php etc etc. I know these kind of sites and databases are good to a certain degree, but if they get a WHOLE lot of hits in quick succession (ie the Digg effect), the database is in danger of overloading and going down.

My question is, what kind of traffic levels does this type of thing usually happen at? If I'm getting say 1,000k hits an hour? 5k? More?

I'm considering trying to buy some traffic, but I don't want to spend the money only for my site to go down because of all the hits. Plus also in the future I'd like to plan for the eventuality that my site becomes a 10k - 20k or more daily site.....would a database still be able to handle that?

I know there are a lot of factors to consider that make this a tricky question to answer, but if someone in the know could at least give me an idea that would be MUCH appreciated. Cheers boys and gals.

[Justin_Xsara]

If you hire a good PHP and MySQL programmer and optimize your server it should be easily able to handle a few millions hits per day. Well of course, I assume that you're hosting on a dedicated server. But if you have poor knowledge in PHP and MySQL your site could go down even because of a couple of thousand hits. A couple of years ago I had one site (non adult) that was running on own dedicated server and server went down because of about 5K hits per day Now I even can't imagine what I could do that forced my server to go down on 5K hits So if you don't know what you're doing, hire someone to optimize your PHP scripts, databases and server.

[sevenhelmets]

Cool thanks for that reply. Yep I pretty much don't really know what I'm doing. Prior to May I had only heard of mySQL and php because I'd seen it written in various places, or in address bars of my browser!!! I've come a long way since then, but I think your advice is sound. So far one of my sites reaches close to 5k hits on a good day and has been holding up, but I don't want to push my luck.

[azzam]

Caching the generated pages can dramatically reduce the hits to the database server

[Hentaikid]

Yep if you use cached pages you're basically serving flat html until the pages are edited/updated, all the advantages of the database, none of the problems

[TheDailyFuck]

Coming from the mainstream world, I can tell you that using cached pages is common in Joomla and Drupal. It's the only way to go dynamically and even moreso if you're on shared hosting.