tube server configuration
 

Planning to open a tube next month but before this would like to know what server configuration fit my needs.
It will be a medium size tube site with not more than 300 simultaneously members online and for the first month plan to add around 1000 videos average between 100-600 MB each.
Will be enough only one strong server for me or should i start at the begining with 2 not-so-strong servers ? And why? Please explain.
Thinking about to use nginx and varnish cache
Please no spam offers (yet).

300 users online at once is probably going to require quite a powerful server. If you can turn on that traffic like a faucet, then build your server with alot of ram and a focus on disk i/o. That being said, i'd look into CDN's and a host with a cloud storage (ie. reflected) to house the data. Then you don't need to worry about scaling...

thank you konr4ad
So basicaly i will need like 100 T hdd (just in case), 32/64 gb ram splitting like this:
Server number one
nginx,mysql and varniche cache
place where my tube script running
CDN for thumbs

Server number two
where i host the videos
(nginx or apache?)

This was exactly i was worry about including making backups. How can i backup these amount of data?

You'd use something like R1Soft and backup to their servers. Again though, this is where something like a cloud storage comes in handy since they handle all the redundancy and scaling for disk i/o and bandwidth.

If it was a client running our script, and wanted to use two servers I would recommend:

Server 1 (Web server):
- Apache (or nginx)
- Mysql
- Hosts Script

Server 2 (Media Server):
- Nginx or Lighttpd
- Hosts thumbs and Videos

then when traffic and disk i/o increases (since it's typically not an IMMEDIATE thing), i'd use Server 2 as an Origin for the CDN until I start running into issues with drive space, and then i'd start looking into cloud storage. You could of course just skip right ahead to cloud storage and cdn's and stuff but may as well keep costs down at the start.

You could rsync or ftp the directories or drive(s) without gzip compression. Don't even tar them if you're short on diskspace.