The guys who ran The Pirate Bay had some interesting ideas on how to "safely" run things on hosted computers.
IIRC they only hardware under their direct control was a front-facing routing/load-balancing system that routed all traffic through VPN connections. Then they'd host different aspects of the website's software stack (database, web server, etc...) using different providers, also routing all that traffic through VPN and the router/load balancer.
The idea was to "blend in" as much as possible so the hosting providers don't know they're hosing part of TPB. Which is made easier by all the traffic being encrypted by and routed through the VPN. And if they did get caught/shut down by one provider, all they had to do was update a file on the router/load balancer to point it to a replacement host using a different provider.
Then for that routing/load balancing bit they had multiple hot backups in various parts of the world that were set up to auto-switchover if the primary went down.
Problem being, the only people who know how to do that... were running websites in 2004. You don't see distributed systems on owned hardware even being proposed these days, unless your email address has DOD or MIL in it somewhere. And colleges are teaching the CLOUUUUUUUD, not Big Iron.
A bit of a tangent and not related to hosting but I find it interesting how they all preach the cloud, yet anyone working in IT who has to keep privacy as their highest good does not go with the cloud. I noticed this at work.
No one likes the cloud, no one wants to go with a cloud solution to the point where esoteric software is preferred to the cloud software which might be better but is harder to justify. Kind of happy people are this based at work.
If by "really high" you mean ~500 simultaneous commenters, yes. Of all the dumbest things I've ever done, volunteering to run a gaming forum was the dumbest.
The guys who ran The Pirate Bay had some interesting ideas on how to "safely" run things on hosted computers.
IIRC they only hardware under their direct control was a front-facing routing/load-balancing system that routed all traffic through VPN connections. Then they'd host different aspects of the website's software stack (database, web server, etc...) using different providers, also routing all that traffic through VPN and the router/load balancer.
The idea was to "blend in" as much as possible so the hosting providers don't know they're hosing part of TPB. Which is made easier by all the traffic being encrypted by and routed through the VPN. And if they did get caught/shut down by one provider, all they had to do was update a file on the router/load balancer to point it to a replacement host using a different provider.
Then for that routing/load balancing bit they had multiple hot backups in various parts of the world that were set up to auto-switchover if the primary went down.
Also a Light-Switch-turned-Data-Kill-Switch they asked the Police to press after TPB got raided and they complied lol
Problem being, the only people who know how to do that... were running websites in 2004. You don't see distributed systems on owned hardware even being proposed these days, unless your email address has DOD or MIL in it somewhere. And colleges are teaching the CLOUUUUUUUD, not Big Iron.
A bit of a tangent and not related to hosting but I find it interesting how they all preach the cloud, yet anyone working in IT who has to keep privacy as their highest good does not go with the cloud. I noticed this at work.
No one likes the cloud, no one wants to go with a cloud solution to the point where esoteric software is preferred to the cloud software which might be better but is harder to justify. Kind of happy people are this based at work.
Why would a CS program teach web hosting? Or does CS mean something else besides Computer Science?
Odd, all of my courses pushed distributed hosting, load balancing, cloud hosting, SaaS, HaaS, all of it. And that was a decade earlier.
For a site like the farms, a bulletin board system would work well and be run stupid cheap.
If by "really high" you mean ~500 simultaneous commenters, yes. Of all the dumbest things I've ever done, volunteering to run a gaming forum was the dumbest.