Too many sites on a server

[andrewsmd]

I'm a newbie to this so forgive my ignorance. We host a lot of sites on a server and some of them generate quite a bit of traffic. What I'm afraid of, is at some point in the future, the load is just going to become too much and I'm going to need to spin up a second server. What is the best way to do this? We use plesk as a hosting panel and I have looked for something on plesk and running two servers, but I cannot find anything. Do I just set up two servers with two versions of plesk and maintain them separately? Is there some software I can use to sort of make these servers act as one web server? Any insight would be much appreciated.

[Karma]

Do you host your sites on your own server or do you have someone host them for you? If someone else hosts them, what are the allowances vs your current total traffic?

[wheel]

I think you may want to look into virtualization, and I think that means linux.

Basically (I am not an expert on this, this is merely my understanding), you have 1 to more than one physical server. You install virtualization software on each of them as the main behind-the-scenes operating system. The effect of this is that all the machines now act as one single 'virtual' server.

From there, you then install your operating system the virtual server. If you've got three physical servers, then your one 'virtual' server still looks like one machine but with the horsepower of three. Need more horsepower in the future, simply add a fourth physical server and tie it into the virtualization, and now your 'virtual' server is spread across 4 physcial machines but still looks like one server.

The next cool thing you can do is have multiple 'virtual servers' on the basic platform - you're not restricted to one virtual server. So you could set up three phsyical machines, install your first virtual server that's your live systems, and install a second seperate 'virtual' server that's entirely discrete (even though it's running on the same physical hardware) for testing. Or install a linux and a windows virtual server. Or sell virtual servers. etc.

But do your homework - I could be completely wrong on how virtualization works.

[andrewsmd]

Karma, we host our own servers, I would implementing all of this.
Wheel, our servers are actually virtualized right now. I'm very experienced in virtualization, that's not what I'm looking for. Virtualization allows you to set up the servers like you said, but that doesn't accomplish what I'm trying to do. I know how to set up multiple virtual servers, what I'm looking for is having two servers acting as one when it comes to handling the web traffic. I.e. the a record only points to 1.1.1.1, but when the traffic comes in, some sort of software takes a look at the load on both machines, and directs the traffic to the server that has less of a load on it at any given time. By the way, Microsoft Hyper V is the virtualization software we use and I really like it.

[LifeinAsia]

The term you're looking for is load balancing, not virtualization.

Physical (or virtual) servers A and B are configured identically for the same site (except different IP address). A load balancer (H/W or S/W) sits between the servers and the Internet. Requests to your site come in through the Internet and hits your load balancer (which has the public IP of your web site), which then redirects the traffic to server A or B depending on whatever rules you give it. (Setup correctly, if A goes down, it will then send all traffic to B until A comes back up.)

Dedicated load balancer boxes may run you a few grand.

We've used Foundry and F5, although I wasn't involved in the setup process.

[andrewsmd]

I didn't bring up virtualization, wheel did :). I contacted our microsoft guys and found this. Microsoft has built in tools call Network Load Balancing (NLB). To keep content in sync, you can use the web farm framework (WFF). Here's a really good how to on all of it (I hope this doesn't tick off the moderators!) [iislogs.com...]

[wheel]

Really, Huh. I thought that the way I described it is what web hosting companies did, and they did it through virtualization, not load balancing. I did load balancing 10 years ago, figured it was replaced with virtualization.

Goes to show, don't believe everything you read on the internet, even if I wrote it (perhaps particularly if I wrote it(.

[edited by: wheel at 5:00 pm (utc) on Jul 13, 2011]

[andrewsmd]

I think virtulization is part of that. I.e. massive servers that host smaller nodes that act as the web farm, so you're probably partially right.

[J_RaD]

ahah yep its load balancing wheel, and yep its 10 years old but some stuff is just the foundation that no matter how much it ages it still makes sense.

Basically (I am not an expert on this, this is merely my understanding), you have 1 to more than one physical server. You install virtualization software on each of them as the main behind-the-scenes operating system. The effect of this is that all the machines now act as one single 'virtual' server.

hahah huh? please link me to the article that told you such things.


hey andrew now you've got to get diff servers in diff parts of the country / globe that serve that area and keep each other synced :-)

[aspdaddy]

Load balancing could work, as could a better RAID controller or processor. You can even load balacce by simply teaming your network cards - all depends what you want to achive at what cost.

Virtuals only really useful for dynamic provisioning of servers and carbon reduction