What kind of servers do websites like Yahoo, Orkut, etc. use? What is the structure of their network?

I have asked this question to know how I can start a large scale website.
What kind of servers do websites like Yahoo, Orkut, etc. use? What is the structure of their network?
google started with a bunch of old desktop computers and a stripped down version of linux %26amp; apache
Reply:Very large sites like yahoo/google etc. do not run off-the-shelf web server software. It will usually start out as apache running on unix/linux/bsd which is then itself highly customized for virtualization/large scale replication, then the web server is *highly* customized, tweaked, re-written, deployed on hundreds or thousands of individual servers and server "farms", all communicating and updating information form one site to the next as information is updated/changed.





It's not likely you need to worry about it, just set up a LAMP server and start from there. (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) If/when you outgrow that, THEN you can start to worry about something with higher performance/scalability. LAMP will handle more connections than you can afford bandwidth for.
Reply:Most of the serious web entities (like Yahoo and MSN) are on specialized large scale business server systems that are specifically made to handle the number of connections for webhosting.





Most are not systems that you would find on the normal channels. Most also have special enterprise level versions and setups of Unix, linux or Microsoft server editions that are setup specifically for the high demand of their web presence.





The hardware includes specialized processors like the PA-RISC, Intel Itanium, MIPS and ALPHA, unlike the common sale processors of Xeon, Athlon, and Pentium.





But as others have stated, starter companies and smaller sites generally start out on standard hardware with standard stripped down server software.





To really get an appreciation of what goes into this, and why most companies don't broadcast or share their specifics with outsiders, you would need to go through the advanced portion of Information Systems education.
Reply:Normally and almost all of the webservers has linux and mainly Redhat and for big websites as you mention above they use the apache server





I can tell that orkut 99% is made of java


so google has started it in a bunch of few old computers,





But for yahoo it is such a huge network, it can't be started like orkut


you have to read a lot to understand the Structure of yahoo and same is of google


they are complex


http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/how...


http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/PRESS...





Hope it Helps!!!!











Please answer mine also


http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/PRESS...
Reply:Large websites use multiple servers to apply to certain applications. like answers for example would have a considerable amount of dedicated servers that apply to this particular portion of yahoo with numerous backup for redundancy. Usually large sites would use server chassis with numerous blade hard drives to limit space usage for just one application. in many different regions to support their WAN.