[Sam]

Have you ever had a site large enough that it's required a full dedicated server just for that site?

I spent a few days setting up a search engine using a readily available script. It needed a dedicated server for resource use of crawling different sites. I purchased a budget dedi from Hetzner, nothing compared to the enterprise dedis holderhost uses. Unfortunately it stopped crawling at 20million pages.

What are the specs of the dedi?
From memory, it was a 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD server with a CPU with a passmark of ~8000.

holderhost's servers have between 32 and 72GB ECC RAM, Xeon 1240v3 to Dual X5650 CPUs, RAID 10 hdd and 1gbps port.

[Fergal]

ForumCoin is on a VPS, but it is not large enough to require a full dedicated server, yet.

That sounds like a very exciting search engine project Sam. Is the site still active?

[Sam]

ForumCoin is on a VPS, but it is not large enough to require a full dedicated server, yet.

If it's well optimized it certainly shouldn't for a while. There are also other things which can be done to reduce load and delay upgrading to a full dedi: offloading the MySQL database, storing member attachments on a separate vps etc.

That sounds like a very exciting search engine project Sam. Is the site still active?

It was actually. I had the perfect domain for it too: seek.li. I wish I knew more about how search engines (and ranking algorithms) work. From my understanding (from a Computerphile video), search engines have a similar structure to a library drury system. It would be impossible to search through billions of documents, of summaries of webpages crawled, in a reasonable amount of time. Instead the search engine goes to the "category" of the search first. The script I was using was https://www.seekquarry.com/ and you can see it powered on the author owned website: https://www.yioop.com/ (810569486 pages/26135995843 urls is the size of the archive). My idea was never to create a search engine that had perfect results. I wanted to arbitrage results which is what GoTo.com did in the early days of search (purchase keywords from one source to direct to a page of search results and make money as people clicked on ads on the way out).

[CyberFreak]

ForumCoin is on a VPS, but it is not large enough to require a full dedicated server, yet.

If it's well optimized it certainly shouldn't for a while. There are also other things which can be done to reduce load and delay upgrading to a full dedi: offloading the MySQL database, storing member attachments on a separate vps etc.

Also search can be a big killer on a large forum. That was one of the biggest problems I faced when Fergal owned ForumPromotion and it was on shared hosting. Searches caused all our resources to be used and searches to take many seconds. Using something like Sphinx should help when a forum grows to the point that it is outgrowing the server.

[Alexandoy]

From what I remember, we use a dedicated server to test software in my former office. It is a bank and what we usually test are tellering software that needs an environment to simulate several tellering terminals.