Replicating content between USA and Europe webservers [closed]

Question

I am making a website with dynamic content including users registering and updating content.

The challenge is that the users both exist in USA and Europe. The way I understand it, is that if I got a webserver in Europe, USA users will probably get at slower experience than the users in Europe.

I expect the intial visitors pr. day would be at least 4000. Very fast it could go up to +100.000

Questions:

• Is it really a problem? Do you have any experience in this situation?
• Is cloud hosting the way to go? Does that solve the potential scaling problem?
• Are there any hosting providers that have servers in USA and Europe? If yes can they replicate the website in both places seamingless so I don't have to deal with the technical aspect of it?
• If I have to do it myself, do you have any guides/advice how to do it using Debian Lenny?

Answer 1

If you have the cash, content delivery networks (CDN) such as Akamai can do that for you.

Answer 2

You could also investigate an option of having a smart cache solution for the users in USA.

Answer 3

Amazon web service is now offering 1 year free service for limited resource usage. You can try their S3 cloud service for CDN. They have servers in America, Europe, and Asia.

Please read before register: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

A link for how to use it for CDN, you can find more in google.

http://davidcancel.com/using-amazon-s3-as-a-cdn/

Answer 4

If you have some cash to pay a decent OSS engineer, you may want to check out DRBD ( http://www.drbd.org/ ), which is basically a RAID 1 over TCP.