Re: Hosting Costs
"The database could actually contain small files (eg photos)"Your contention that you'd have easily scaled it to 100s of 1000s of items falls apart right there. Sure, if no one was looking at the site. You'd quickly have found it falling apart with the traffic levels a site with 100s of 1000s of products gets.
Hmm.. Better tell all the sites that use a similar setup and get large numbers of customers that their systems are falling apart even though none of the thousands of hourly customers have complained! (they probably use more than one server and some form of load balancing, but I'll bet each server has a full copy of the DB)
Oh, and considering we're talking updates for a very old MB, I doubt there's going to be that much traffic - but if you think so there's other posts with people suggesting donating a RPi to Intel so they can use that as their server for the old kit - those posts need your expertise to correct them as well.
Me... I have a couple of owncloud servers, don't get much traffic (just me and 3 or 4 family/friends). The files in them are around 500GB/each and around 200,000 items each. Admittedly few of these files are actually contained in the DB but it only takes the piddly little laptops (Tosh M200 running a 32bit Debian (due for retirement) and Dell D630 running a 64b Devuan, each IIRC with 2GB ram (though the Tosh may be 1 or 1.5gb). The Dell also runs OpenVPN for me when I'm on otherpeople's WiFI. If/when I get Fibre on, then I may see traffic levels increase but I doubt the machines will get anywhere near full CPU or RAM use even with the line maxed out.
(Of course, if you can actually back up your claims... (article from 2000, first paragraph is most relevant as we're talking static pages)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
