How was the site built?

Hoocoodanode is built with Drupal 6, a handful of modules, and a fair amount of custom code. Drupal has a huge learning curve, and is somewhat resource intensive, but it's a flexible system that is meeting our needs nicely.

It's now running on Amazon Web Services, using an Ubuntu Linux distribution. The system configuration now includes a memory based resource cache called Varnish, an opcode cache called APC, and a data cache called Memcached. Cache is a valuable currency here!