There is a lot of money to be found online. People can make really good money through freelance jobs, blogs, ecommerce websites and even social networking websites. It might sound a bit ridiculous but then it is very true. People are making good money from their social media platforms. You can only imagine how much more you will be able to make when you have your own social networking website. If you own a popular social networking site, you are bound to make significant wealth from it. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the likes are multi-billion dollar businesses.
It goes unmentioned that these sites have a really good idea behind them and the execution is also flawless. This is the main reason why they are extremely popular. If you want to create a good networking website, then you should take into consideration these two factors - idea and how to execute it.
When you are planning to make a social networking website or mobile app, you should have a good database set up. Now, this is probably one of the hardest tasks. Constructing a database is not as easy as one might imagine. There are issues such as the number of users which you will have to consider. For example, creating a database on MySQL is able to handle a user environment of about ten thousand comfortably. This however brings into light other issues like the architecture of the design.
The architecture of a database is one of the most complex features. This is why you need experts who will make sure that you get nothing short of excellent service. Creating a database is costly and correcting mistakes can be even more complicated. It has to be done correctly right from the start. This way, you get to save yourself a lot of money and unfortunate incidents.
There are certain features that are very important for all website databases. It does not matter whether it is a social networking website or an ecommerce site. Among these you will find features like:
- Backup and recovery
- General operability
- Monitoring
The backup system is very important. Just in case an accident occurs and causes damage to the database, the information that was stored in it can be recovered. Technology has made it possible for fantastic databases to be set up. All that you need to do is get in touch with a data IT expert to help you identify the best ways to backup your database.
What is the capacity of your database? In the case of social networking websites, the biggest issue is always traffic. The moment your website becomes popular, you will need to have to cope with the traffic. There will be so many people visiting your site and relaying certain information at any given time. If you do not have a good database, then you will have issues with the traffic directed to your website.
A database administrator (DBA) is very important. You will always need someone to monitor your site's database. Some minor errors in the database could render the website completely dysfunctional. The longer your website remains off the worldwide web, the more money you will be losing. This should not be happening at all and it will not happen if you contract DBA expert services. There are two ways that you can go about the database administration task. Getting an administrator should not be difficult at all. You can get remote DBA services. These are companies that provide DBA services and they always place someone to watch over your website at all times.
You can also hire an in-house DBA. This is basically another member of your team, working in your company. They also go on holidays and weekends. This means that your site will not be watched at all times. If something happened over the weekend, you might not be able to remedy it in time before it causes extensive damage.
Vital features of a social media database
The above are features that are general for all websites. However, for social media websites there are some things that you will need to have in your databases. These include:
- Performance
This refers to the response times. These are expressed normally in terms of percentiles and not averages. Normally, you can handle performance on both writes and ready by buffering the writes and caching the reads. Caching will reduce both read traffic to the database and the response times that are seen by the end-users.
Caching might have its own issues but it helps more than it hurts, even when the most unsophisticated caching solutions are employed. The writes can be buffered so that at peak times, the database is not overwhelmed.
- Scalability
This refers to the number of users that the site can handle concurrently. It is expressed as requests-per-second. A good database for a social networking website should support read-scaling, write-scaling, use of lock-free data structures and algorithms.
- Fault-tolerance
There are certain types of faults that your database will not be able to handle when they occur and there are others it can. The fault tolerance of a database basically refers to the types of failures that the system can withstand. Remember, you do not want your website to fail to perform its work because of faults in the database. There are those minor faults which might occur but the website is still functional. With the expertise of data IT professionals, it is possible to create a database that has a great tolerance to faults.
When these three features are present in your social media website's database, you can rest calm knowing that it will offer good service to your visitors.
Conclusion
Generally, social networking websites bring in a lot of money. This is primarily as a result of the traffic that these sites attract. In order for the site to be of great performance, there must be a high performance, scalable and fault-tolerant database in place. Monitoring of the database is also of great importance. It keeps the database functioning at its best.