There are a couple of things to think of:
1. Your client's estimate of how many million visitors they're expecting is almost always overly optimistic. I hear these claims every day, and can count the number of times they amounted to anything remotely resembling the expected traffic, on one hand.
2. Your pipe is too thin. 30Mb/s? You're being screwed. Unless you're talking about a VPS solution that has artificial limits imposed, or you're on ancient hardware (like Pix 501 firewall which is a 60Mb/s device but doesn't even cope with that in production), there's no excuse for having less than 100Mb/s Find another hosting company.
3. Your biggest performance gains is almost always in the way your application works, and how efficiently it uses various forms/levels of caching, and ultimately, how often your server hits its discs. For instance, if you're running a PHP app, you absolutely have to have an opcode cache - APC, xcache, eAccelerator - doesn't matter. You absolutely have to put temporary data - session data, for example - in memcached. You absolutely have to set long expiry times on your static content - images, css, js, etc). You absolutely have to enable compression on text content (html output, js, css, etc). On any machine built in the last 10 years, the CPU penalty for in-line compression is far outweighed by the efficiency improvements.
4. You need to offload static content (you're talking video - forget about it on a single box) to an external provider - Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files - and enable CDN so that your static content doesn't involve your server at all. This usually requires coding your application in such a way that it farms out static content via these providers' APIs rather than storing it locally. A bit of work but it also makes it much easier to deploy extra web servers when you need to.
5. Stay away from NFS. Sticking your content on an NFS share to achieve scalability is not a very good solution, and will come back to bite you. It always does.
1. Ya that I know, they expected 10's of thousands of users by now, they still at the thousand level, the 1st one. LOL
2. I do not know for a fact what it is, tested with a large file download via ssh to get an idea, after many months they have finally given in and signed up with the new hosting today, we not have access to multiple t1 lines. Oh and its a dedicated server, 2x500gb in raid, 8gb ram and 2 quad cores. Beyond that I do not know.
3. Been trying to research the cacheingfor months and its surprisingly hard to get a proper answer, that or I been googling horribly wrong. Contents cache handler is file and sessions are handled in the DTB. Still trying to get the expires headers working, tried pluggins and htaccess overrides with no joy, checking it in yslow.
4. So far all the video content is outsourced, youtube, vimeo, etc. Once this things working properly they will be upload original HD content and I have already insisted on amazon Cloudfront.
5. No idea what NFS is, unless you mean the game series. lol
Included the bellow in the hcaccess file, supposed to override expires headers and I have confirmed the required modules are enabled. Yes yslow still complains about the expired headers
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header unset Last-Modified
</IfModule>
# turn on the module for this directory
ExpiresActive on
# set default
ExpiresDefault "access plus 24 hours"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 months"
