by Jasmine S
Have you ever wondered how your favorite sites — Facebook, YouTube and Google – handle the vast traffic that they receive every day? What is it that enables them to cope with the millions of site visits each day? The answer lies in data centers, which house servers and other IT equipment needed to power the websites. In these data centers, network and security support are also provided to ensure that the websites are always up and running optimally.
Peer1 Hosting created the following infographic which features the most visited websites of the world and the data centers that keep them running.
Facebook, which is most likely the first site that you access every day, holds 11% of traffic share volume. With more than 550 million users and one million websites that have incorporated Facebook’s platform, it requires a data center that is capable of managing the 100 million new photos that are uploaded each day and 700 statuses that are posted each second. This is equivalent to 25,600GB of log data daily. So what are Facebook’s “secrets” to handling this amount of traffic and data?
At the moment, there are at least 9 third-party data centers located in the US to cope with the traffic that Facebook receives from all over the world. About 60,000 servers power Facebook, taking up between 10,000 to 35,000 square feet of space which cost Facebook $50 million a year to lease. The power used in those data centers can power up to 4,615 homes for a month. Now that’s some astounding figures, aren’t they? Thankfully, Facebook has realized the amount of carbon footprints that they are leaving, so their new data center will be an energy-efficient one that is able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1,065 tonnes a year and save 2.5 million kWh.
Now, let’s take a look at Google who holds second place behind Facebook in online traffic shares. The most popular search engine holds 8% of traffic share and receives more than 1 billion searches a day. Interestingly, Google doesn’t want to reveal the location of their data centers, citing their security as well as ours. However, we do know that they have about 36 data centers which are primarily centered in the US (19 data centers) and the Europe (12). Google claims to have the most energy-efficient data centers in the world where lead-acid batteries that are used for each server, resulting in energy efficiency of 99.9%.
Former traffic leader, Yahoo, has an interesting data center called a “computing coop” in Lockport, New York. This center has a long narrow layout that resembles a chicken coop and utilizes a natural air flow and winds to keep servers cool. Yahoo’s effort in reducing energy doesn’t just stop there. Most of their data centers in New York are hydroelectric-powered by the Niagara Falls! This leads to 40% less electricity and 95% less water used than a regular data center.
Now let’s look at how the most popular blogging platform and the largest open-source blogging service copes. There are more than 18 million blogs hosted on WordPress with 310 new posts made every minute. Some of WordPress’ data centers are owned by PEER1 Hosting, a company who has 17 data centers located across the US and Europe.
With the facts and figures provided by the above interesting infographic, you can now imagine the sheer quantity of data that goes through the data centers and the amount of power needed each time you log onto your Facebook account, make a search on Google, check your Yahoo! mail or write a new blog post on WordPress!
Jasmine is an experienced web developer, web consultant and web hosting enthusiast. She is also the chief editor at Top 10 Web Hosting — a web hosting review and resources website.