The time have come in my second semester at school were we have a database class and Windows administration class (MSCE). In the lab I was able to practice the more advanced stuff with my professor helping me. What I'm trying to say here that it required a lot of knowledge to run a large high traffic website by one person. There is no short cut to success; you have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. When someone says to you that it’s easy, there not telling you the truth. You cannot just download a Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal and expect them to work as you wanted to. If a certain features are not available or you don’t like you have to do it on your own otherwise it will cost you money to hire someone. If your site becomes so large and received millions of page view a month, and you need to move to a dedicated server but you can't afford or just don't want to spend money to hire someone. Then who's going to manage your server? What if the database becomes corrupted or you need to add a couple of fields and need to populate a data in those two fields? That's why it's important to learn little bit of everything, just incase you needed it in the future. So while your dreaming of running a large high traffic website by yourself with no large capital to invest. Why not start learning other stuff.

1. Learn HTTP protocol and possibly other Web protocols
Good understanding of HTTP protocol helps a lot when you’re doing the more advanced stuff because you know what sent to the header.

2. Hand code HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Learn how to hand code HTML, CSS and JavaScript, code everything in notepad or other text editor. Once you mastered HTML tags and CSS attributes, then you can use WYSIWYG such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage.

3. Learn server-side programming
There are different choices of server-side languages to learn. Pick the one you are comfortable working with. Also learn other languages if you have the time.

4. Learn SEO and Internet marketing
Learn how to market and optimize your website. It doesn't matter how good the design of your website, if it is invisible in Google, Yahoo and MSN, you will not get high traffic. Learn how to analyze your web log and apply necessary changes to the site if it's needed to boost profit. Study your visitor’s behavior pattern.

5. Learn basic project management
It's important to manage your time properly so you won't get burn out, know how to prioritize the tasks, keep track of all changes/update in the spreadsheet so you don't forget what you did months or years later.

6. Learn how to manage your server
It saves you a lot of money if you can manage your web server. Learn how to configure the Web and FTP server securely. Learn how to create users account and assign proper permission. Learn how to assign proper permission to folder/directory and files. Learn how to close unused ports. Know how to use (perfmon) to monitor server performance.

7. Learn database design, SQL coding and Administration
Learn database design like creating Entity, attributes, normalization and denormalization. Knowing when to normalized and denormalized a database is good. Learn how to write clean and secure ad-hoc/in-line SQL query or stored procedure. Learn ADO and ADO.NET. In ADO.NET you can use (MARS) multiple active results which is good if you are using multiple queries. Learn how to optimize query. Learn how to manage SQL server 2005 using Studio Manager or through Query Analyzer. Learn how to use SQL profiler to track the bottleneck causing poor performancer. Learn how to create user and assign proper permission (don't use username=sa and password) that's bad practice. Learn how to configure your SQL 2005 server securely. Perform weekly or monthly defragmentation of the physical drive.

Note: SQL server over time, experience "internal" fragmentation of its data. This occurs when records are removed from database pages but the space it occupied is still there after deletion. Eventually this space is reused, but as it is reused, the data pages become fragmented, which can lead to unnecessary I/O, especially in case of table scans where many data pages are read one after another.

8. Learn how to use basic commandline such ping,whois,netstat and tracert