Hi all,

Im looking at starting up a web based business that is based around a website. The actual site would be perhaps 12 - 15 pages of dynamic database generated content. The actual server side apps would be Apache, PHP and MySQL

However if all goes well I want to be able to

a) expand over several servers
B) Build in a high level of redundency.

The OS would be Win 2000/2003 as by day im a windows admin and feel more comfortable with this platform as its my bread and butter.

So is there any easy and reletively cost effective way to use SM boxes and maintain and load balance the data/http page serving across several boxes (ie several copies of the data) so that if one fails the others take the load until its fixed)

The reason I ask is that several SM boxes with interconnects is still cheaper than even one server in the UK, but the maintainance would be an issue in the states

You would probably need to work with sales to determine the best price configuration for your needs as far as network configuration goes. If you are getting non-Celeron, you could rent a switch from them and do an internal network amongst your machine. Internal traffic using the 2nd NIC would not be counted as bandwidth usage.

As for load balancing, I am not sure if they do have ready hardware to offer that solution but you could look into software load balancing techniques. Then again, it all depends on what you are hosting and how you are going about it.

If you are using a multi-teir database system, the architecture would probably have some load balancing facilities built into it which allows it to access the least loaded engine.