A site called “PlentyOfFish.com” is currently getting 30 million hits a day. The number doesn’t blow me off. However, what surprise me is that this site is basically operated by single man “Markus Frind”. How does he achieved that? If you want to hear how he does that, you can go to his interview from this link. Otherwise, you can read the summary I got from his interview.
The stuff I learnt from Markus
You may think that Markus must spend a lot of $$ to maintain his site. A picture of server farm may be popped up in your head. Hahaha… all he needs is just 1 web server and 3 database servers. This is the cost that you and me can afford. No bother to write your business plan and wait for VC $$ nowadays. 
Here are some quick tips for Markus
- You need a lot of RAM. RAM is cheap, go ahead to power up your box with tons of RAMs please!
- Markus uses Akamai CDN to offload the bandwidth of fetching images across different locales.
- Separate R/W database operation.
- Markus uses one database as master for write and 2 databases as slave to handle the searches (read). According to him, radius-based searches demand lots of resources. “If you have one system to do just one thing, it will do it much efficiently.”
- Markus put RAM to both web and db servers. “If you can load your whole db in the RAM, do it!”
- Optimize the db access is the key to handle lots of requests.
- Denormalization is necessary if you want to reduce the number of joins that can potentially slow down your queries.
- PlentyOfFish.com is purely based on “Word of Mouth” marketing. Do things right, your users will spread it out for you. Cheapest marketing strategy ever!
- PlentyOfFish.com is FREE site. Because it is free, it doesn’t have high requirements like uptime. It can be down without much issues.
- PlentyOfFish.com solely monetized from advertisement like Google Ads. Just this, Markus is making around 10 million annually. Amazing!
- PlentyOfFish.com is purely using Microsoft solution like IIS, ASP.NET and SQL Server. In fact, you can build it using other solution like Apache, Spring, MySQL
I love to see how people like Markus beat down the giant like Match.com. One man beats hundreds of people with simple system settings. Incredible! Folks, there is no excuse whining no $$ to start your business!
Although it sounds easy for Markus during the interview, there are areas the interviewer didn’t cover:
- PlentyOfFish.com webfront is not looking good. How could it attract the first set of users in the first place? FREE
- If you go to a FREE site without data, you may leave it right away. How PlentyOfFish.com attracts the first real user? Did PlentyOfFish.com crawl competitors’ data to power his site as bootstrap?
- PlentyOfFish.com purely makes $$ from Google AdSense. However, according to John Chow, Adsense is not a good place to make $$. Why is that?
What possibly may go wrong for his approach:
His database architecture is traditional master-slave approach. It can offload the read but not write operations. Obviously the master becomes the write bottleneck and a single point of failure. And as load increases the cost of replication increases as well. Replication costs in CPU, network bandwidth, and disk IO. The slaves fall behind and have stale data. The folks at YouTube had a big problem with replication overhead as they scaled. This problem can be tackled by shard/ federation. I will discuss this topic later.
