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Theoretical Question

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  • 25-08-2011 9:07pm
    #1
    RedXIV
    Registered Users Posts: 8,432 ✭✭✭


    Was thinking about this earlier. Have recently got an .ie domain and hosting (actually i renewed it after it sitting for a year idle) and have been playing around with web stuff. I've 20GB of web storage and then I was wondering is there any reason why, instead of purchasing more space from the expensive hosting company, I can't just use something like dropbox to hold data and get it from there when my website needs it?

    This might be a very stupid question but I really have only started playing around with web stuff and am unfamiliar with the capabilities :)


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    #2
    Adam
    Closed Accounts Posts: 8,866 ✭✭✭Adam


    What do you mean by "data"?


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    #3
    RedXIV
    Registered Users Posts: 8,432 ✭✭✭RedXIV


    well the idea in my mind was a collection of text entries, probably referenced via a database, just because I was thinking of an old book that used to float around school that everyone wrote in and had to keep getting new ones.

    So I was thinking of it like a site that can hold say the 100 most recent text entries and after that it would query the external database for the older ones.

    Does this make sense?


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    #4
    Adam
    Closed Accounts Posts: 8,866 ✭✭✭Adam


    I think I understand, but it seems as though it would be just as easy to put the actual text in the database as opposed to putting a reference link to dropbox and having the text document on dropbox...


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    #5
    mark renton
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,696 ✭✭✭mark renton


    you cannot run a database engine from storage, you would have to use xml or similar, then performance compared to database would be greatly less - also the management of storage files would be a nightmare, can you imagine having to find a file manually, find the data in a file manually, and then having to edit that data manually each time a change is required


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    #6
    jmcc
    Registered Users Posts: 7,410 ✭✭✭jmcc


    Well 20GB is a lot of space for simple text files. Most web databases are measured in MBs rather than GBs so even shared hosting (probably what you have as a hosting package) is fine.

    Regards...jmcc


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    #7
    RedXIV
    Registered Users Posts: 8,432 ✭✭✭RedXIV


    Ah i know logistically that my scenario doesn't require it at all. I was just thinking if it was an option for any content heavy websites :)


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    #8
    jmcc
    Registered Users Posts: 7,410 ✭✭✭jmcc


    RedXIV wrote: »
    Ah i know logistically that my scenario doesn't require it at all. I was just thinking if it was an option for any content heavy websites :)
    With a good database design, proper indexing and proper coding, content heavy sites can run on fairly ordinary hardware. I've one P4 box with a 162GB database serving between 100K and 200K pages a day. It really does depend on the content and text content with minimal user interaction (simple SELECT queries rather than complex SELECT and INSERT queries) is actually not that much of an impact in terms of resources. If you need to serve content from multiple servers then you could examine Amazon's cloud services or read up on Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

    Regards...jmcc


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    #9
    Genghiz Cohen
    Registered Users Posts: 7,182 ✭✭✭Genghiz Cohen


    With c# you can access dropbox from code.
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2576923/dropbox-com-api-for-net

    the problem with this approach is that you have to copy the data from DBox to your server, then send it to the user.

    A faster approach would be to populate the page with direct links to the DBox content so you effectively send the user a page of pointers to the content and their browser gets the content, this might only work with images or straight text though...

    Maybe a client side add-on for more complex database operations, hte instructions come down in the page and the add-on executes them...

    It's an interesting and cheeky idea.


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