Ive heard people talking about there ideal setup for servers under a hosting biz.. most say to use a separate mail server, dns server, etc.. why is this?

Why cant all the info. just be kept on one server for each account?
could someone explain this to me?

think about it ... if that box goes down, then ALL of your services are down. is that really an ideal setup? :)

plus, if you get hit w/ a spam attack when your mailserver is on your webserver, then your webserver will be affected by the attack as well. try to distribute things a bit.

But wouldnt that make managing the servers very difficult?
How in the world woudl i keep up with multiple accounts split between multiple servers?

Im sure there is a common sense answer , but since im kinda new at this i dont know it , lol..

Thanks,
Jeff

well, if you don't want to do it manually, maybe you could use mysql authentication for FTP/mail, etc. that way everything would authenticate off the database server.