I run a webhosting company and have nearly filled my box to capacity without overselling space. Would a cluster allow me to basically continue selling services and act like an overflow by pushing new client accounts to the next box? If not, would I need to get a completely independant box and software to continue my services?

I can run a business, but I'm still learning the behind the scenes stuff.


Thanks

Even in a cluster environment, you can put sites on a single system and point DNS requests directly to an IP on the server, not one of the Load Balanced IP addresses. You can have a set of load balanced websites along with individual websites on each server.

So in essence, a cluster will work as an extension of my existing box by load balancing my client accounts between the 2 boxes? Is this going to be difficult for a novice person to setup? I use modernbill for billing and automated account creation if that helps answer my question.

As with most things related to computers and hosting, yes there can be difficulties that you will need to overcome or work around in order to develop your hosting environment.

I would suggest that if you are not fully confident with your own abilities to expand into a solution like that that you contact a 3rd party server management company to discuss your set-up needs.

Greetings:

You may want to check out H-Sphere from http://www.psoft.net/

H-Sphere allows you to have a multi-purpose server cluster.

That is to state that each physical server within the H-Sphere cluster can run one or more logical services such as DNS, mail, mySQL, web, etc.

In a properly managed H-Sphere environment, if you cap off one web server, then easily (within 15-minutes) add another Web server, and new sign ups will be appropriated to that new server (or you can use a GUI-based tool to migrate sites to the new server from the existing web server to balance both servers).

H-Sphere presents a unified control system to the end user; so if you start with Unix-based servers, and expend in Windows, the user interface is similar.

Thank you.

P.S. H-Sphere is extremely front end loaded for the learning curve. This means you have to put in a lot of time and effort to learn and get H-Sphere set up correctly. However, the front end learning is more steep than it is deep. So once you have it down pat, you coast the rest of the way down hill.