Starter Web Availability Fault Tolerance
Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 8:55 am
I'm now working for a startup out of Boston and we're in discussions about server availability so that we can sustain outages for like 4 hours, and also handle higher web traffic. What is a starter web availability system that you would recommend, and is there anything "canned" out there that makes this easier to setup and test? We want to get this going separately like a lab, and then when it all works, we start doing limited cutover testing to see if we can move to this.
Currently we spend around $2500 per day in advertising, and have a $20 transaction coming across our single server every minute to 3 minutes, sometimes even triple that.
Note -- I love cPanel, and have pretty decent Linux skills, but will probably need extra help on some of the seriously tough Linux config stuff, like mail, DNS, fending off DDOS, some of the more advanced firewall stuff, etc.
I've thought about doing 3 Linode servers installed with centOS/cPanel. So we'd have 2 web nodes and one MySQL database server. The 2 web nodes would need a fast replication system so that I could change a file on one and it would be on the second web node within a very short period. So, on fast replication, I don't think NFS will be fast enough -- right? I mean, NFS might have like a delay of several hours, right? So, if we have a 4 hour maintenance on one web node, we can still limp along. But on the database server, we'd have to implement a 4th server (a dev server used as standby) and then cutover to it when our central database server is being worked on.
Okay, the above is all well and good, but the trouble I'll have are some of the heavy duty Linux tasks such as fending off DDOS, anything more than simple firewall rules (I'm pretty good with iptables, but not good enough to fend off DDOS), advanced DNS, advanced mail config, etc.
P.S. My background is that I've had a taste of some of this while working at ADP. There, we used 1U servers (and eventually, blade servers) and built all this using Suse Linux. (I'm not a fan of Suse. I prefer centOS + cPanel. I would probably prefer Ubuntu Server, but Webmin is so dang hard to use with it for doing mail configs, DNS tasks, setting up FTP, etc.)
Currently we spend around $2500 per day in advertising, and have a $20 transaction coming across our single server every minute to 3 minutes, sometimes even triple that.
Note -- I love cPanel, and have pretty decent Linux skills, but will probably need extra help on some of the seriously tough Linux config stuff, like mail, DNS, fending off DDOS, some of the more advanced firewall stuff, etc.
I've thought about doing 3 Linode servers installed with centOS/cPanel. So we'd have 2 web nodes and one MySQL database server. The 2 web nodes would need a fast replication system so that I could change a file on one and it would be on the second web node within a very short period. So, on fast replication, I don't think NFS will be fast enough -- right? I mean, NFS might have like a delay of several hours, right? So, if we have a 4 hour maintenance on one web node, we can still limp along. But on the database server, we'd have to implement a 4th server (a dev server used as standby) and then cutover to it when our central database server is being worked on.
Okay, the above is all well and good, but the trouble I'll have are some of the heavy duty Linux tasks such as fending off DDOS, anything more than simple firewall rules (I'm pretty good with iptables, but not good enough to fend off DDOS), advanced DNS, advanced mail config, etc.
P.S. My background is that I've had a taste of some of this while working at ADP. There, we used 1U servers (and eventually, blade servers) and built all this using Suse Linux. (I'm not a fan of Suse. I prefer centOS + cPanel. I would probably prefer Ubuntu Server, but Webmin is so dang hard to use with it for doing mail configs, DNS tasks, setting up FTP, etc.)