Starting early today, the website of Inq7.net has been suffering from heavy traffic and has resorted to a low-graphics version of their website. This is no surprise considering the recent issues plaguing the nation concerning the Gloriagate fiasco.
I did some quick research of my own on how Inq7.net is set up. So far, what is widely known is that their site is hosted by Bitstop (video streams are coming from Bitstop, no doubt.). I check their DNS servers and gave me 3 IPs, the primary DNS from a US (Mountain View, California but the IP is registered to Inq7.net) and the other two is Philippine based, owned by PLDT and Eastern Telecoms.
I have no idea how many servers are clustered to deliver content but I heard that they were not using any database servers for content delivery because of the risks it entails. With running a DB, when something crashes it or it chokes, content delivery is halted on all levels. By using flat files, they can still seperate the archives from the recent news and be able to serve them up quite efficiently. They’ll only have to worry about the webserver (they run Apache/1.3.31 with PHP/4.3.8) instead of both. These server/s host 5 sites — Inq7.net, Inq7.com, Inqseven.com, Inquirer.net and Inq7money.net.
With over 1 million unique visitors and 30 million web pages served a month, I am sure they have made some sort of server clustering or load balancing to be able to opmitize their site.
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There is no reason not to use databases, even for reasons you’ve listed. There are many ways to fit a need (databases w/ cached content). My own opinion is that their web development team still does not have the training required to run a site of that magnitude. I recently worked for a college and developed a CMS to manage our content. It took well over a year to develop and is still in development and is far from complete, but the framework is there and it works. If their web development team does have the skills required to do a major overhaul, I suspect conflict between the powers that be and IT. Old school management doesn’t want to invest into anything unless it’s benefits slap them on the face.
the new inq express page is so refreshingly different from the old version.
maybe they should cut out on those ads that clutter the page. nakakahilo maghanap ng link sa lumang site.
the revamped site is simpler and so much easier to navigate.