building a large scale web service

If I am going to write a web service that will be called 100k times per day and that web ser开发者_JAVA百科vice will expose the database to user. What best suggestions/approach do you guys think? Should I host the database in E2C or Rackspace (cloud solution) and use PHP to code the web service? Should I use Rails/Python? I just want this to be scalable... suggestions are welcome

I see that a lot of startups uses Rails and Python, I wonder if scalability is better with those languages.

100k per day is not so bad (less than a transaction per half second). But what you really want to know is how many transactions per second its going to peak at. Nature of your data etc. Determines how much you can cache your data, whether you just need multiple webservice servers with a single database instance, multiple database instances replicated, etc.

Hosting in the cloud is a good option. Amazon is quite good.

Scalability doesn’t depend on the programming languages you use. Hosting in the cloud is a good solution in terms of scalability. There is a wide range here Amazon, Jelastic, Google, Heroku etc.