Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

We had dealmac come and speak today at the monthly IPSA meeting. Its always interesting to see how sites like that work. A few months ago, we had the CEO of al.com come and speak. That was basically a marketing pitch, but there were also bits of information on how the content for the site is gathered.

The dealmac gang did a great presentation. They opened up with one of the founders giving an overview of how the site got started (anyone remember MacNuggetts?), how they gather their content, and how they make money (sponsored links and such).

The cheif technical officer also spoke, highlighting some of the soft- and hardware they use to power the site. They run Red Hat Linux on all their servers, using Apache as the webserver, MySQL for the database, and PHP to talk to the database. They also use Qmail to mail out their e-newsletters and such.

Their network setup was impressive as well. They have 2 load balancers, 4 web servers, a dedicated server for their forums, and a dedicated server for their SSL. All the content is stored on a seperate server, and rather than having a page generated from the database for every request, they use a caching system, updating the pages 15 times a day or so. They also have a dedicated SQL box, an SQL slave box, and a redundant server that syncs up to the SQL and content servers incase one of them fail.

It seems like a pretty impressive setup. I wouldn’t mind seeing it in person.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2004 at May 06,2004 @ 4:44 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.