[fusionman]

Maybe you should focus on building your product and utilize a service that will be able to scale better than you will be able to do on your own. Check out Amazon Web Services http://aws.amazon.com/ . There are a lot of big sites using their EC2 and S3 services...you should check these out. That said, I am not a scaling expert, so if you're hell bent on doing it yourself, good luck! I'm sure somebody on here will be able to offer you "do it yourself" advice.

[niels_olson]

oh, we have no desire to do it ourselves. We only started using our own server because of the politics of hosting university content offsite. It makes the relations with the professors easier.

I've been looking for ways to move storage and bandwidth to AWS, but just set up my own personal account with JungleDisk a couple of weeks ago. What utilities do you recommend for shifting webserver stuff to AWS? What can be pushed? As I understand it, it's strictly blobs, and all data manipulation still has to come back to the site's CPU for processing. Am I mistaken?