How do sites like facebook have so many different pages?

[Rooz]

In a site like facebook or youtube there are so many different parts/ separate pages. since there are like 500 million members there are at least 500 million unique pages, not including apps and fan pages. how does this work, and how much money does it cost to run something like this? Mark (the founder) launched this from his college dorm room. how? are there companies that can have servers like this for cheap?

[ANONYMOUSHAPPY]

I believe that it's a ton of coding and server preparations. Because it would have to support PHP. Considering you wanna run a FACEBOOK! You'll need tons of servers or a few expensive ones. If you wanna start a website sorta kinda like this were people can log into it. I heard that http://www.webs.com has a log in user interface for their websites now. Go check it out!

[Tim]

Facebook is funded through advertisements. People will pay Facebook to put their advert on the side of the page which everyone can see.

[Adarsh K]

What Anon said was right.
It doesn't actually have pages, the pages are dynamically made.

The basic of what happens is
Your information is stored in Databases,. Which put simply is like storing everything in a excel document. One column for names, one for address, one for friends etc. - very simplistic idea of a database.

Now what happens is when you request to see a certain page it requests the information from the database, which will then get processed by the server. This is where a server side script which usually kicks in, can be asp, php, which ever they write. Now this is processed by the server and creates a page based on the information. Then you see.

So actually there are no pages in facebook besides the initial login page. everything is dynamically generated and informatoin is stored in their database.


As for how they were funded, he started very small scale he used to go to colleges and advertise to get more members. So initially he made no money and everything was made by outside investments not advertisements. What investors do is they will give you money, expecting a return later.

The reason behind this is, you would not be able to get good advertising companies untill you have so many unique visitors. Hence you would waste advertisement space on low paying ones. So once they reached a good number they took advertisements and partnerships with other companies.