How does the server of Msn or Yahoo keep up with the extreme high volume of traffic?

Question

1. There are constantly thousands of uploading / downloading requests. You dont need a phd to figure out that it would require a lot of bandwidth and Disk space.
- how many people, on average, are actually making download requests and upload requests on a second basis?

2. Where and which company provide the hardware such as hard disks and bandwidth to Yahoo for its services. For example, the following services require a lot of disk space and bandwidth:
1 billion email accounts of 2Gb in disk space, 100000 people uploading attachment to emails, 100000 yahoo business webhosting client sites servicing 1000 page requests/per site.

Answer 1

That was such an interesting question, I decided to do some digging. First of all, I apologize, I focused on Google, rather than Yahoo or MSN, since Google is far, far, larger. (It's that world's largest search engine/map site/email service/etc by search volume)

Each of those companies builds huge server farms, as they're called. [See my first link]
Google needs special server farms to "handle 2.7 billion online searches a month."

It turns out,
"The Times gives the latest estimate of how many servers Google is currently operating at its 25 locations around the world: about 450,000.

That figure has more than quadrupled since 2004, when Google’s server operation was already estimated to be one of the world’s most powerful distributed supercomputers. "

That's just amazing! Another interesting fact:


The United States, has altogether "Nine million servers"
and with respect to Google, their
electricity usage alone "somewhere between $50-million and $100-million every year — and growing."

Every penny paid for by the company's online advertising.
Remarkable.

Answer 2

yahoo and msn are using many servers to serve its services. These servers are configured in cluster and load balancer to distribute request among servers and better uptime.

Also there is bandwidth's load balancing for fail over. ( that's called link load balancing - they generally buys bandwidth from many ISP)

Also they uses ( yahoo ) proxy and caching server for HTTP (web server) & dns for fast access of web pages and protection of web server.

yahoo is using akmai's caching services for better perfomance -- check www.akamai.com

Majority servers runs on Linux OS and Intel base hardware

Answer 3

Servers. Plural. Hundreds, maybe even thousands all over the world!!!

When you got the bucks, magic happens.