Cool, a thread with my name in the subject

Yeah, the site runs fast for a few reasons. Mainly, it's the beefiest dedicated box we could get: dual quad-core Intel Clovertown, 4GB of RAM (thinking of adding more soon), and 3 750gb hard drives in a raid-5... That's the main thing.

GZIP compression is enabled on the server, as well as APC, but I don't have Drupal running through it. It seemed to have helped, although I can't be positive - maybe it was just my imagination.

As you guessed, we are serving our site design images and Streaming Flash Video through a CDN, since those elements really are "time crucial" and need to load as quickly as the rest of the site. We use CDNetworks, who are one of the biggest CDNs in the world, and believe it or not we serve almost 1TB through them a month, just images and video. I think that helps quite a bit.

In the future I expect to move the database to its own server, right now it doesn't seem that we need it, but when there are slowdowns that is usually the culprit.

Regarding the affiliate stuff, the Ubercart affiliate is different from Linkshare. What Linkshare allows you to do is basically, have other sites sign up for you - and they do most of the work. It wasn't me that made that decision, to be honest (it came from higher up) but the network is pretty huge and it makes it really easy to sign up.

Unfortunately I don't like dealing with their reps very much, and their system for adding banners and links is incredibly awkward. But getting past those things the network is able to get you a lot of affiliates and a lot of traction on sites who might not otherwise know yours even exists.

Hope this helps.. thanks for your compliments and feel free to ask more questions if you have any.

APC is a server-side caching and compiling accelerator ... there is a Drupal module (a couple I think) that allow you to utilize its abilities by serving the code through it. Basically it's like caching but, it allows you to cache within the compiler itself. Compiled code is much faster to execute and cache than the output sent to the client. It seemed to have made a difference even though I have the module disabled; it seemed to be a little buggy when I set it up on our server.

Yes, we're using the Normal caching with Drupal, and CSS aggregation. I had JS aggregation patched in at one point but that also was a little quirky, so I removed it.

As far as hits we get, well - I can't give you exact numbers of course. According to quantcast.com we get 87,000 unique visits a month from 12,000 unique visitors. The actual number of visits is about double that (because many are repeat visitors).

http://www.quantcast.com/rifftrax.com

But yes, if you're looking to do a large site, a Dedicated is the way to go. I've also got hosting on AN Hosting, who seem to be the best fit for Drupal sites - since they rely on fast hardware, there isn't that much of a bottleneck (namely with writing to the database). So if you're still looking for a decent shared option, I'd suggest them.. they are cheap and seem to be reliable, but I hate cPanel which is what they use. Sigh.

If you can't go that route I'd recommend at least an increase in RAM. The bottleneck is almost always going to be the database, since Drupal makes a lot of db requests.

Thanks Glad to hear the site I built is holding up so well!

The main thing about websites is people have no attention span. They need content within 5 seconds of being there, otherwise you could lose them. So, it helps to get a beefy server if you can afford it, especially for the amount of traffic we get