Redundant Hosting Setup
September 29, 2008 – 10:59 am
Redundant Servers
I have just spent the weekend helping a friend to build servers and setting up a hosting facility. It was a weekend of cables, kernels and RAID driver patches!
A few months ago we sat down and started a planning session to evaluate the needs of his company and we decided that the current hosting setup was not good enough. The days of using a collection cheap dedicated servers at a US hosting facility were long gone because their customers demanded a more reliable service. After evaluating some of their needs we quickly decided that Cloud Computing is not an option. We had to build our own system on our own servers.
We had many variables to consider including:
- dedicated resources
- physical access to the servers
- load balanced HTTP service across several servers
- Cloudbursting facility for web and application servers
We went for the following:
- Decent powered servers with lots of RAM and RAID
- CentOS 5 OS’s
- Pound load balancer
- Multiple instances of Apache2, PHP5 etc
- qmail email server
The system is now ready to be moved into a cabinet at Databanx and it is hoped that it will go live later this week for a few of the clients. The ultimate plan is to transitioning all clients before the end of October.
I love the smell of fresh tin in the morning!
