I have a single server right now hosting about 50 domains. I have over the years averaged an outage or two a month. Most of the time a reboot fixes it but as I am obviously (50 accounts) a small company I don't have staff to constantly monitor the servers. Outages are usually short but naturally usually happen according to Murphy's law when I'm no where near my computer.

This weekend I made my reliabilty worse by attempting to upgrade my plesk from 7.5 to 8.0. I completely crashed my server and had to reformat server twice before I could finally get it back up and working. Plesk. My total outage time was 19 hours. That last outage caused my largest client who owns around a third of my accounts to make a stern request or more correctly demand that I move to two servers with a workable backup system.

Naturally I face several problems, besides the fact of not really being technically qualified to be in the hosting business.
I would like automate file sharing but don't see myself getting it setup properly. Biggest issue of concern is going to be MySQL. I've read up on this and I understand those problems. As a developer this is really something I understand much better then the networking and system side anyway.

Another question that came to mind though is Email. I know the Load Balance is primarly designed with Web and FTP use in mind but what about email? If an email message ends on server 2 but a client keeps pulling mail every fifteen minutes off of server 1 (all day long) when will he ever get the secondary message?
Is it possible that email messages can get lost for days or longer on the second server?

Joel

You could use NFS, but then the files actually only reside on one computer. You could do a daily rsync mirror, but then your site will potentially be slow for the time that the rsync is happening. As for mail/mysql - better splitting those onto seperate servers.

Basically, just getting 2 load balanced servers and running all the same services on those will probably not improve things much.

Our current EV1 setup:
2 Internet facing webservers
1 Locked down database server (shared by the 2 webservers)
1 Mailserver (primary DNS)
1 Seperate webserver for other stuff (& Secondary DNS)
We also have a backup mailserver hosted on our SDSL connection at the office.

Splitting up the applications onto seperate servers really helps when deciding where to allocate resources (in terms of time to fix things, or new hardware). I thought it was an acceptable risk to only have one DB server as they do tend to be quite robust, in experience it seems to be the webservers that fail most often.

So, in your case, it depends on how much money you have and how much time you can afford. If your sites run heavy sql queries, put mysql on a seperate server and keep the webserver and email on the same server. Your clients will obviously appreciate a boost in speed that this may bring. If you really don't know what you are doing, Total Server Solutions can set this all up for you and they are pretty good I think.

yea typically you dont need to load balance a mail server. you usually just use load balancing for web/mysql. if you just use a dedicated mail server it can handle alot of mail and i dont think you would have to use any load balancing.

jblodgett

I sympathize with your situation. I think going the LB route is overkill for your application. A stable server with a good series of built in redundancy would be more the answer I think.

I haven't rebooted my server in over 6 months and have not had a single hickup.

Here is what I have running:

Hardware RAID5 with 4 drives.
5th Off RAID Backup Drive which receives daily backups of all domains.
Computer (at home) which logs in weekly to get back ups.

Script level protection (www.rfxnetworks.com).
SIM - This is the best, will renice your services that crash and let you know that it has !

So, I guess my solution is build a good server, install some good software, then go pay a monitoring company 5 bux a month to page you if your server stops responding..

I think ultimatly, this is a cheaper solution than a LB Cluster.

Cheers

Ryan

We can build a Dual Xeon 3.2 server with 4 hot swappable 250GB SATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration and a 5th, internal drive for backup storage. This would mean even if one of your RAIDed drives failed the server would not have to be taken offline to replace the faulty drive.

If you're interested, please be sure to contact custom.orders@ev1servers.net