In our experience, social applications and widgets come with a variety of hosting considerations that regular web applications do not--speficially traffic spikes on your way to Viral Heaven. The most important architecture decision that we make is how to scale our applications effectively to handle this. With the rise of new utility computing platforms such as Mosso and new cloud computing platforms such as Amazon's EC2, there are many different ways an application could be hosted--ways that do not require any expensive upfront hardware purchases. More importantly, though, these are ways that allow us to custom build scaling scripts around your software with intelligence to add new instances (and remove them) as you experience erratic ups and downs in traffic.
FaceySpacey Technologies's startups are all built on top of Amazon's EC2. We are true Gurus in this space. With this platform we can provide the following:
Elastic Cluster Expansion:
If your application makes Digg, no problem. If your widget gets published at a highly trafficked website, also not a problem. If you're Facebook app is lucky enough to snowball into Viral Heaven--also not a problem! With EC2's on demand server instantiation, we are able to automatically add resources to a server cluster when necessary. This ensures that your application will remain up and responsive during periods of heavy usage, while saving money that would have otherwise gone to unused resources.
Cost Effective Hosting:
Due to the elastic nature of our hosting platform, we can provide very cost effective base level hosting. No longer is there a need to keep idle hardware around waiting for a traffic spike. With our Amazon EC2 and S3 expertise, you can relax knowing your apps minimum hardware configuration will scale as it needs to when traffic increases. The best part is that all of the hardware is priced on "per-hour" basis, so when the spike subsides, we turn off any unneeded servers.
We at FaceySpacey Technologies have researched the optimum solutions in hosting and have vested about a year into Amazon EC2 and S3. This is the solution we believe in for Web 2.0 social applications with potential of going viral very quickly--and we're sticking to it! We can customize our scaling scripts to any LAMP-based application. We support the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, as well as Java and Tomcat. If we're behind the complete planning and execution of your startup (which we usually are), you can count on us developing your project to scale according to our proven methods with Amazon EC2!
