Drupal Hosting : Hosting, server load, and Amazon EC2

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This is a drupal question asked by CauliflowerEars on 08 June 2007

3 questions about hosting:
1. Is it possible to run several websites on one drupal installation on a dedicated server? I once had 30 (non drupal) sites on a server but they were all fairly low tech sites with low to moderate traffic. At what point would drupal or an average spec linux server start to complain? I know it depends on traffic etc but for arguments sake assume 1 well used site with 30,000 members and several (say 5-15) sites of 500-5000 members. Any ideas or educated guesses here would be useful…
2. In terms of future scalablity and performance would it be advisable to have 2 servers, one for the database and the other for drupal?
3. Has anyone come across Amazon S3 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261) and Amazon EC2 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011)? Can you give any indication as to whether this might be a suitable platform for drupal? To me it looks cheap considering what you get, am I missing something? – what’s the catch?
If you can help shed any light on any of these I’d be grateful.

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