Make a expertreport on web/php scaling and heavy traffic load

Hi, I am the project manager for a large website which has the potential to reach several thousand concurrent users, so all of a sudden heavy load is an issue to be concerned about. The website will be built in PHP, utilising DRY and OO. I want the report to adress the following themes: 1. The impact upgrading server hardware has on the performance of the site, and what type of hardware has the biggest impact, cpu/ram/etc. 2. Should we go for dedicated server from vendors like hostgator paid on a monthly basis, or a microinstance from Amazon or Rackspace paid per minute? What are the pros and cons? 3. We are going to try to make as much static as possible, what are the best ways to utilize cache? I have read briefly about Varnish, nginx, squid, memcache, etc? Which are the best, or pros and cons? 4. Our visitors will be primarily from USA, but also from Germany, Spain, Europe etc. Should we in addition to a cachesolution like in point 3 go for a CDN solution? 5. What are the best CDN solution? 6. How can I optimize MySQL databases for performance? Master/slave.. I dont understand, could you please make it easy to understand. :) 7. Are there any good load testing systems out there? I found [login to view URL], is it any good? 8. Is this a good read on this topic? - [login to view URL] 9. What are the biggest no-nos for performance issues? Please provide me with urls to articles if you have any good, I have found a few ones here: [login to view URL] [login to view URL] (could you please download this for me so that I can view it offline?) [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] (could you please download the mp3, slides and the video itself if possible so I can view it offline?) [login to view URL] I need this report done in 7 days from accepting this project. Please state in your bid what high load websites you have worked on before, if you cant drop any names and experience your bid will not be considered, I need someone who has walked the walk and not just talked a lot. :)