# Confusion about servers?! advice needed...



## rainbowtornado (Apr 18, 2014)

Hi, I'v been designing an app for android and found a developer to make it, I'm not amazing at servers and domains..ect

The idea of the app is people visit it once per day to win prizes, the problem is this requires a server to hold their data, originally he was going to design the app and host the server, the problem is he is no longer able to set it up for over 3 moths, after those 3 months I need to set up my own server and transfer the data although I have no knowledge of how servers work, the data they need to store and so on...

Here is what he told me about the server and I would be extremely grateful if somebody could tell me the basics of what it means and point me to the best host and what I need to buy from them+ Costs

"I used the value of 300,000 from our previous communications and relayed this to my hosting company. This is worked out in potential bytes used. 
My database for each record would be as follows:
Registration details = ~250 bytes per person.
Prize details = ~250 bytes per prize.
Bucket details = ~16 bytes per entry.
A week using the above (and 300,000 users) would be as follows:
Users = 75,000,000 bytes (~71.53MB)
Prize = as is.
Bucket = 16 x 300,000 x 7 = 33,600,000 bytes (~32.04MB).
Added together this would be a database of over 100MB per week with about 2,100,000 "good" hits.
To do the same calculations with 7,000 users (daily 7,000 "good" hits) then the following would apply:
Users = 1,750,000 bytes (~1.67MB)
Prize = as is.
Bucket = 16 x 7,000 x 7 = 784,000 bytes (~0.75MB).
This, added together would be far better at over 2MB with daily traffic of 49,000 "good" hits. But if you say this app is going to be popular then it is always better to go with the "worst case scenario" so that you are covered for all eventualities."

"You would need a domain (I'm guessing this will cost about £10/year) and server as app will be web based. You would need webspace with apache running that allows running of php pages and support of a mysql database for my solution to work as this is what I would be building it on." :huh:


Thanks for reading as I know its long (and very confusing for me)

Can you point me to a host, I was hoping for a way for the host to be able to upgrade the server without the app going down (in the case the app somehow got popular)

I would also like the cheapest possible but still reliable

Thanks
-Rainbowtornado

PS: Please explain in the MOST SIMPLE terms possible as I can use computers and phones but have never had to look at things like servers...


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## kilonox (Dec 3, 2010)

Hey RainbowTornado,

Welcome to TSF! 

It seems like what you need is a SQL server and a basic apache webserver. These are both simple to set up and some managed hosts do all that work for you. It seems your best bet for cost and scalablity would be going with a cloud provider. As far as which you should pick, that is up to you. Remember, you usually get what you pay for when it comes to servers. As far as cost goes, you are looking at ~20 USD per month starting out as you will probably only need 1GB of ram or less on the server side, and about 20GB of storage. The nice thing about cloud, you can usually upgrade your configuration with little to no downtime. So as your app grows, you can spin up resources, and if usage goes down, spin back down. 

I hope that was what you were looking for.

Kindest Regards,

Zach


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