Sorry for the late chime-in. Here's the "budget scalability" route we at http://www.fireflie.com are taking for our rewrite in Django.
We decided to go with AWS. Initial hosting costs are free for the server until we are ready to push to production and need a larger instance. We are using Nginx for our front-end and uWSGI for our django application. Nginx makes it easy to add more Django Application Servers as needed without any down-time (Scaling through Parallelism). We can easily move our database (MySQL) to larger and more optimized EC2 Instances as needed. If we ever got to a point where we somehow outgrew Amazon (possible?), then it'd probably be time to re-think our application design and maybe move to dedicated hardware. There's a few major benefits here. First, there's no real extra development requirements to simply add more application servers -- so no higher development costs. Second, it's somewhat easy enough to upgrade instances as needed so you could write up some easy directions for your client and let them handle it if they don't want to pay you. Finally, you can take advantage of S3/Cloudfire for *cheap* data storage and the quick content delivery network. There's no internal bandwidth charges if you use S3 from an EC2 instance. I can see their perspective for wanting to be scalable off the bat. Computers and Bandwidth are cheap, developers are not. In the long run it can be very expensive to re-write an entire web application in a scalable manner if it's not done so in the beginning. I don't think you'd have this problem with Django unless you're doing something very custom and server-dependent. In my opinion, paying $1,000 for a web application, and therefore expecting a large amount of traffic and probably income, is way too little to expect any kind of a guarantee -- let alone a guarantee that it'll scale to infinite and beyond. Good luck! On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Sithembewena Lloyd Dube <zebr...@gmail.com>wrote: > And this - over time? I can only think of one phrase now - premature > optimisation? > > Think about it - to optimise an application, a developer needs measurable > metrics to work with? So, surely, beyond "good" or "best practice" > application architecture, the rest becomes a "wait and see" affair? > > I have a problem putting a sweeping scalability guarantee on a (for > example) USD1000 application. Many firms spend far more on the optimisation > alone - and that, with cold hard stats to work with. > > > On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 12:57 PM, kenneth gonsalves < > law...@thenilgiris.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 10:22 +0200, Sithembewena Lloyd Dube wrote: >> > Thanks for the response. The project will be hosted at WebFaction >> > (which I >> > recommended, having used their services with great results in the >> > past). It >> > will start off on shared hosting and could end up in a dedicated >> > server. >> > The client wants some sort of "performance guarantee". >> >> webfaction --> vps --> dedicated server --> many dedicated servers ... >> -- >> regards >> Kenneth Gonsalves >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Django users" group. >> To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. >> >> > > > -- > Regards, > Sithembewena Lloyd Dube > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django users" group. > To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
