The Freshman Handbook: A Hint for Server Placement in Online Social Network Services

For new social service providers (freshmen), it is critical to determine where to deploy the computational resources to best accommodate future client requests. Existing proposals on server placement rely on collecting and analyzing request history from servers that are already running, which are not so useful to those starting new online social network services (OSNs). In this work, we aim at helping new OSN providers with intelligent server placement by exploring available public information from existing social network communities. We explore the commonality between the selected set of server locations from multiple OSNs and utilize such similarity for future OSNs to select their server locations. The similarity is ultimately due to the fact that the underlying human relationship is relatively consistent across OSNs.