I could really use the help and advice of someone knowledgeable who has been through the experience of growing from one server to multiple servers.

I'm trying to expand my small hosting company by adding new servers and eventually getting rid of my oldest server which is kind of like the "master" server right now, and there are a few things that I'm very unsure about - mainly DNS. I'm hoping that someone here will take a few minutes to read about my current setup and hopefully point me in the right direction. I'll start by explaining my current setup, and then my goal, and hopefully it will make enough sense to someone here that maybe your response will make sense back to me.

My current situation / setup:

I have 2 dedicated servers at ThePlanet.

The first one, I call the "master" box, because it is basically the DNS brain plus has customer accounts on it. I have two nameservers registered for it, so it's like this:
Hostname - mainbox.example.net
Nameserver 1 - ns1.example.net / 123.456.789.123
Nameserver 2 - ns2.example.net / 123.456.789.124
RHEL 3
cPanel/WHM

The second box is just one that I've "added on" via the DNS Clustering feature in WHM. It does not have it's own nameservers, I guess it just shares the DNS Zones with the "master" box, so it's like this:
Hostname - secondbox.example.net
Nameservers in Basic WHM setup are set that same as they are on the "master" box, riding on it's coat-tails so to speak.
RHEL 4
cPanel/WHM

The main problem with this arrangement is that if "mainbox" goes down, so does "secondbox", because it relies on mainbox for DNS since I only have to nameservers registered. The other problem is that the older box "mainbox" has been experiencing problems for a while now that nobody can figure out, TP support or otherwise.

My goal:

- I'd like to add a third and fourth box to the DNS cluster, and get rid of "mainbox" and let the new box take over it's role.

- I'd like register more nameservers, like ns3.exmaple.net and ns4.example.net, and find a way to set things so that if one box fails, the accounts on the other box still remain live.

Basically, I want to expand to have multiple servers all under the same company domain like example.net, with a failover DNS setup so that I can just continue to add more boxes and not have all of them go down if a "master" server goes down.

So a few of my questions are:

- For starters - should I register ns3.example.net and ns4.example.net and assign them two IP's from the "secondbox.example.net", OR should I make it so "mainbox.example.net" has IP's for NS1 and NS3, and then "secondbox.example.net" has NS2 and NS4?

- When I add a third box, "thirdbox.example.net" and then DNS Cluster it through WHM on "mainbox.example.net", how can I finally safely get rid of mainbox? Would it be by registering the NS1 and NS3 to two IP's on "thirdbox.example.net" and then transferring all of the accounts from mainbox over to thirdbox, and then shutting down mainbox?

I'm really confused as to where to go from here. I need to have at least two dedicateds running, but it's time to get rid of that original "master" or "mainbox" because it has been experiencing problems for a long time now that nobody has been able to resolve.

If anyone has taken the time to read this - thank you VERY much.

If anyone can point me down the correct path / method for expanding to more servers and get rid of the old "main" one, I would be forever in your debt.

I have contacted a few consultants whom I trust very much, because I would be willing to pay what I can for some help with this, but they're too booked up to help me.

Can anyone please help me figure out the right way to go about this, so I can try to expand grow my small hosting business?

Thank you, sincerely.

Hi,

I am not as knowledgable as most people here, so my suggestions are limited to the basics.

First, it is a good idea to have four dedicated servers with the following roles:

Server 1.
Role: Main Server.
Purpose: Serves your webhosting application, i.e. customer sign-up, support, etc.
Note 1: This server is located a different data center being The Planet (TP) or ev1servers (ev1).
Note 2: This server is a "public server", i.e. available to the public.
Note 3: This can be a low cost server.

Server 2.
Role: Backup Server
Purpose: Stores backups of the main server and all future servers that you add to your network.
Note 1: This server is located a different data center being The Planet (TP) or ev1servers (ev1).
Note 2: This server is NOT a "public server", i.e. NOT available to the public.
Note 3: This can be a low cost server.

Server 3.
Role: DNS Server.
Purpose: Maintains the DNS Distribution Network.
Note 1: This server is located a different data center being The Planet (TP) or ev1servers (ev1).
Note 2: This server is ONLY available to your network and whois query.
Note 3: This can be a low cost server.

Server 4.
Role: Customer Accounts Server.
Purpose: Serves your customer accounts (websites).
Note 1: This server is located a different data center being The Planet (TP) or ev1servers (ev1).
Note 2: This server is a "public server", i.e. available to the public.
Note 3: This is a High Cost Server.

Servers 5, 6, etc.
Role: Future Servers for Customer Accounts (websites).

Where it suggests:
"This server is located a different data center being The Planet (TP) or ev1servers (ev1)."
This means do not locate all your servers with one data center because in the event a data center is down then your entire network is down. You get the idea. Most of us in the industry split our resources between the TP and ev1.

As you know, dedicated servers have their primairy IP and DNS. One practice is to maintain the IP and DNS seperately. Again, in the event a data center is down then your entire network is down. Unfortunately, no one can predict when and which data center will be down, but it is assuring that both TP and ev1 are professional data centers and will bring them online as fast as possible.

You said you contacted consultants. What exactly did they suggest?

Hope this helps a little.

Just FYI the networks for TP and Ev1 are now very intertwined. If you are looking for redundancy across datacenters you should consider a different provider entirely. They do all have different power and they do all have different routes but they also bounce traffic among themselves. It is not uncommon for a houston server to get traffic via the dallas datacenter. In a truly worst case scenario it is possible the entire network could be having problems meaning BOTH are done. This is a bit far fetch but you should at least think about that and be aware of it.


To the OP - keep in mind that if you add a 3rd or 4th nameserver every single domain will have to be updated, not an easy task. If you have hundreds or thousands of domains that may take awhile.

Is a dedicated DNS server really needed? Not really for most people. I have no idea how many domains you host but why not just have the 2 nameservers hosted on the 2 servers that have clients? That should be reasonably safe and if both are down it does not really matter anyways.