Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Software and Control Panels : cPanel and load balancing

[Steven F]

Hello, I spoke to Ditlev (CEO of OnApp) recently and asked if he knew about how cPanel and OnApp's built in load balancer worked. He informed me that cPanel and load balancing do not go well together. While I trust him, I would just like to find out more. Any information about how cPanel and load balancing go together would be appreciated!

[SeriesN]

Cpanel does not have a true load balancer as we speak. So far the only built in feature is dns cluster.

[eming]

I just wanted to emphasize - like I did when we spoke - that it's not an OnApp limitation, it could be any load balancer. Or actually, obviously you can load balance cPanel servers, but keeping the data in sync is not a trivial task.
I am sure it can be done though...


D

[Techark]

Depends on what you are wanting to LB.
If you are talking about general hosting it is possible but not very efficient or easy to do.
If you are running cpanel servers and have a specific PHP/Mysql application running on them you can use a couple of remote Mysql database servers replicated to each other and then rsync the normal application files between servers.
You then need intelligent LB's that maintain state sessions so anyone making a connection to a server maintains that state and is connected to the same server as long as they have an active session.
It is not cheap or trivial but can be done, we do it now for a couple of clients.

[mbr]

@Techark - Do you manually select and setup replication per DB or is it something automated for every new DB a cpanel account creates?

[jamiesonwu]

have you tried asking cpanel if this can be done??