Advice on Hosting
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 9:38 pm
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.
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.