Hi I run a network of proxies and am looking for suggestions in relation to a clustered, load share or grid style host. I've already got two dedicated boxes with Layeredtech, but as is the nature with proxies, balancing the load between each box is a pain, particularly when you wake up one morning to find one site has gone from 100 visitors a day to 10,000 and apache is crashing every other hour under the strain. It's easy enough to bring online another box, but the problem still remains, in that some sites take off and you've got to balance the demand, and in my case you've got one box doing 25% and the other box 125%. In my previous job with a company which ran a network of sites we had 5 servers that were essentially clustered, 1 main and 4 boxes for load balancing. I'd think the more economical way for me to progress would be to setup a similar situation for my network, but I haven't got the faintest idea which solution is best or even the tech knowledge as to how to set it all up, if I went that route (in terms of server imaging and what not, cpanel/whmx use and setup isn't an issue). I've looked at options such as Layeredtech's Gridlayer. MediaTemple offer a similar solution although I don't think they allow proxies. Does anyone have any suggestions or experience on the best solution for a situation like this? recommendations? Any hosting companies out there have anything they could offer? thanks.
Hello, We could provide our hosting plans which allow proxies, this is only in a situation of a dedicated server, please have a look at the following link - Dedicated Server Hosting If you have any further queries, please feel free to contact us at or http://support.bodhost.com/ Regards
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm looking for a clustered or similar service, not dedicated hosting, I already have dedicated hosting and I can buy boxes at a reasonable enough price until the cows come home I'm looking at something like Gridlayer or cpanel clustering, where essentially all my sites reside on one server and then the others bolt on in a cluster, or in the case of a grid setup I can easily add capacity as required. There's probably a way of doing this anyway with existing boxes, but I don't have the knowledge to do it so hence I'm looking for packages/ setups that are easy to implement, or even included in a package. If anyone has any ideas I'm fully open
I don't offer clustered hosting but I work with clients to setup this type of service. You can setup your own cluster using round roubin style DNS and rsync updates between the servers. Since proxies dont' use MySQL you can strip down everything on the server to bare bones for best performance. A few different options could be 1 master as the main data node and a few slaves for serving. A (main sites/data here) | B, C, D (boxes used to output sites data and share load)
Thanks ramprage, any suggestions or anywhere you can point me to in relation to setting up round robin DNS? I've seen rsync before which doesn't look all that hard, it's the first part that's got me beat.
Well round robin is basically telling your domain there are other servers available. A load balancer on the cheap On your domain you can add a whack load of nameservers. EG: ns1 to ns6 for 3 servers (each has 2) Then what will happen is every time someone looks up the domain the order of the nameservers is varied - which is automatic. You can have servers: B: ns1 and ns2 C: ns3 and ns4 D: ns5 and ns6
Hello, If you are interested in looking into a true clustered solution, we offer clusters based on the Interworx Cluster Panel and LVS. It's very flexible, nodes can be added or removed at any time, and management is a snap since there is no need to replicate data as you would have to with a RRDNS solution. It will work great with MySQL-based sites as well, which you can't do with RRDNS. Basically, our soution works by assigning a single server to be the storage and database server for all of your sites, and then we can add web nodes as needed. It's extremely flexible, and works great for busy websites, forums, or even as a shared hosting solution for multiple sites. Feel free to PM me or drop me an email at sales at versaweb dot net if you would like to look into it further. The cost probably wouldn't be much more than you are paying for a couple of good dedicated servers now.
Hey Rob, Yeah Interworkx has some very nice looking features for clustering. I haven't had a chance to play with it but I like what I've seen from their site. Does the control panel handle most of the grunt work for the cluster setup itself?
nnet, i think you are haveing a problem with balancing the load between the servers am i correct? If so you can easily fix this. If you do not have hotlinking disabled your servers wont be able to balance the load correctly. Try puting in a code in the proxies so people cant hotlink images from your proxy. This may help.
I don't have hotlinking disabled. It's purely a matter of traffic peaks with Apache not handling the load.