web site design question

I am planning a web site and I want someone to help me design the technology part of the web site. I can pay you a small amount for this report and give you a good rating if you answer all my questions. I don’t need the report to be publishable, just very informative. I.e. I don’t care for grammar errors. If you do a good job, maybe I'll ask you to maintain and upgrade my site in the future. ## Deliverables Description of the site: I want to build a scalable personals web site based on Redhat Linux (most likely 7.3), apache (1.3?), MySql (4?) and PHP. It is a custom built personals site with Flash, dynamic pictures, and search capability. Initially the site may have 1000 profiles and later it may have 2,000,000 profiles. The profiles should have pictures and video and the typical information. Users pay to view the pictures and to contact others. My questions are: 1) What are the functions of application server, web server, database server (i.e. what do they do/ what happens when a user do a search)? 2) How many servers should I have, with different numbers of profile (1k, 10k, 100k, 1m, 2m) and different traffic (1k/day, 10k, 100k, 1m, 2m 10m)? And what is the most cost effective way to go? What about the most secure way? What are the cost and bandwidth at each stage? 3) How can I make the web site scalable? Should I put a West coast server cluster and an East coast server cluster? (Question 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 are important) 4) Which software can I use to make the web site scalable (discuss several and make a recommendation and discuss that one in detail)? 5) What special requirements for the web site and database to make the web site scalable? 6) How should I design the application to for it to run on several servers but appear as one to users? 7) How should I design the database and for it to run on several servers but appear as one to users? Master/slave update? Use MySql native function? 8) How should I structure the database for fast searches? Help me design an index. What is the size limit of MySql under Redhat 7.3? Can I put it all in ram to speed up things? (Question 8 is the most important question) 9) How to make the pictures and videos load fast? Using a different database than the profile database? 10) If there are 1,000,000 profiles, I want the search to return 10 profiles how should I do it? Should I have the search search through everything and then return 10 best results or just the first 10 suitable results? 11) Should I put men and women into different databases or even into more databases by people’s age? Is this possible? Is this a good idea? What are the server requirements? 12) How can I secure the server from hackers and attacks? 13) How should I manage the web site? What is SSH for? Plesk? Ensim? 14) How should credit card numbers be handled by the site? How can I keep it secure? ## Platform LAMP