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Advice on Hosting

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 9:38 pm
by jack_indigo
I know I'm asking a lot, but what the heck. Might as well ask and see what others say. I will probably learn something.

I have a client who's going to have me build his first big project -- a job search site. I anticipate it needing a web farm, some fault tolerance (like have one server go down and the thing still runs), and it will likely suck bandwidth because it might get a large audience.

What I need to find is the cheapest, perhaps innovative, solution that can scale well for now and then scale nicely in the future. When I say cheap, I mean keeping costs low, not cheap as in "you pay for what you get".

One idea I had was to use webkeepers.com, purchase two VMs there to act as web farm systems, and then purchase another VM to act as the central database. The only drawback to this is that the MySQL calls to the central database have to go out onto the Internet cloud again and then back, which is not as fast as, say, staying in the hosting provider's intranet. Now, some people say, well, that's what Mosso is for, but we need something cheaper for now and then graduate into something better later on.

Also, is there a DNS service out there one can purchase that lets you have one domain name name, and it mates an IP for a day to a pool of your web farm IPs? This would eliminate me having to implement a head server with a reverse proxy (Pound comes to mind) on it.

It would be great to stick with one provider and then pay them for more bandwidth and more web farm nodes as time moves on, rather than having to rip everything out and starting on another server.

If you also have ideas on implementing easy caching or database replication for this design, please share as well.

Re: Advice on Hosting

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 2:38 am
by jaoudestudios
Definitely have a Linux system not Windows, for many reason - faster, more stable, cheaper etc...

I recommend Rackspace, they will give you all the support you need - no waiting 24 hours for a response, its all immediate. They tailor your system to suit your needs in Hardware and Software. However, they are not low cost, they are quite expensive. Approximately starting at about £300 per month for an entry level system. The other main advantage is that when they build your hardware, you can ask for a MIRROR RAID setup, that way if one hard drive goes down, your system will stay functional and Rackspace will be notified that 1 drive has failed and replace it for you and no one will notice anything.

I have used OneandOne for many years but recently I changed as their support was terrible and I mean terrible, their answer to everything was GOOGLE IT!!!?!?!? WTF... I wont go into it but my views are here... http://www.forum.jaoudestudios.com/viewforum.php?f=21

I am currently using http://www.WebHosting.uk.com, who so far have been great, they have an online tech support team, so help is always to hand and their prices are reasonable. However, I only have a VM with them so not sure what hardware options they supply etc. But I would not be surprised if they can tailor your system to suit you, as they tailored my install of the VM machine.

Even with the mirrored raid, it would be worth setting up a cron to run every night to do a mysql dump of the database and send it to you - just in triple case.

Re: Advice on Hosting

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 7:46 am
by jack_indigo
What about a multiple VM solution where users come to the central VM, then either remain there or get routed to the second VM. These two VMs then access a database on the third VM.

The downside -- database calls are sent back out on the Internet cloud and back again -- would be nice to have intranet traffic there, not Internet.

And Rackspace is not an option for us, initially. We need something lower cost for now. We need something innovative and clever.

Re: Advice on Hosting

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:40 am
by jaoudestudios
What guaranteed do you have that the VMs are on different servers? As if they are on the same server and that hard drive fails. You will lose both VMs.

To be honest, I would not worry too much about having high traffic until you get the high traffic. Also you will be displaying low res images and data, which will not take that much bandwidth. If you were streaming HD video then I can understand your concern.

Definitely try and keep DB calls on the same server, just run backups to a remote machine.

I would just put it all on one VM and have a backup run every night.