Servers owned by top web companies
October 20, 2009 by Mark
Web companies as generally presumed to have no overhead costs. You might have heard it many times buy a simple hosting, put your website up and start counting the money. 
This is not really true. Setting up web company is quite easy but running it and making it profitable is quite tough. One common ingredient is required for making a web company successful i.e. Traffic and when the traffic increases, quality and quantity of servers must increase to support the traffic increase. A major amount of monthly bills goes into server maintenance and management and hosting.
Did you ever wonder how many server big corporations must be having for handling their web applications:- Read on to know
Google: The search engine giant’s server count has long been estimated at 450,000 servers, but that number is at least three years old.
Microsoft: There’s actually some numbers on Microsoft’s server count, but it’s also out dated. Some sources suggest that Microsoft was running about 218,000 servers in mid-2008.
eBay: With more than 160 million active users between its online auction house and PayPal payment service, and 443 million users on Skype, eBay has a massive data center infrastructure. Figures are not accurate but the company must be running at least 50000 servers.
Yahoo: Yahoo has got another huge infrastructure with some sources suggest that yahoo has at least 250,000 servers across various data centers but this figure is also outdated.
GoDaddy: It’s the world’s largest domain registrar with more than 35 million domains under management. It’s infrastructure is probably similar in scope to that of any other decent web company. Server count is assumed to be around in the range of 55,000 servers.
HP: Sources suggest that HP is managing 380,000 servers in 180 data centers.
Facebook: Facebook says only that it has more than 10,000 servers, but it’s been saying that since April 2008 and it’s now serving 200 million users and hosting at least 40 billion photos. Facebook is clearly way beyond 10,000 servers, and it’s entirely possible that it’s now in the 50,000 server club.
If we check the cost of any entry level India dedicated server from one of the best and most affordable web hosting company, we see that the cost of any entry level server will generally cost $99 per month. So, according to our stats Facebook server costs per month must be at least USD 5 million per month. Hope you get a glimpse of the huge cost involved in running a successful internet business.
