BBC News Under The Bonnet

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 3, 2005 @06:53AM from the that'd-be-hood-in-the-us dept.

diodesign writes "BBC News has revealed that Linux and Apache power its popular news website, along with a modified DNS server and machine farms in New York and London. At peak times, the site serves over 4 million users and 50 million page impressions a day. It's a pretty well explained guide to producing a regularly updated content based website that scales well." From the article: "The technology which serves the site is designed to be as simple as possible. The simpler the site, the cheaper it is to run. There are fewer elements which can malfunction on big days; and there are fewer parts which can be compromised by someone trying to gain unauthorised access."

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Re:Server side includes? by poot_rootbeer · 2005-06-03 07:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

they use SSI (Server Side Includes) to put their sidebar items into each story. Seems like a bit of an antiquated method for these days, no?

If the wheel is still round, why re-invent it?

BBC's site is not ad-driven, and content changes are infrequent enough that redeploying from their backend CMS is good enough. Their edge servers don't require a great deal of dynamicism, and SSI seems to meet their needs, so why not.