Infrastructure considerations for World Wide Web servers

Abstract

This thesis explores issues associated with defining and selecting infrastructure requirements for World Wide Web sites. The explosive growth the WWW has made it the largest single service on the Internet. With this growth comes a need for guidance to organizations or individuals desiring to establish new Web sites. This thesis provides the guidance needed to define a potential site's requirements and select the infrastructure necessary to fulfill those requirements. A combination of literature review of current books and periodicals, as well as surveys of WWW sites was used to obtain information. This information was used to develop the framework for defining requirements. A rule based heuristic was also adopted from the literature and subsequently validated. It is used to select the computing hardware needed for a site. A key lesson learned is that most organizations do not conduct any initial requirements analysis to determine a site's infrastructure needs. The reasons range from oversight to indifference. The potential penalty for not conducting proper assessment of requirements is the same as for any venture, a substandard product and poorly leveraged investment.