Jaguar,
Well I am more towards the idea of upgrading as far as possible and keeping all accounts on a limited number of boxes in order to make upgrades/maintenance/upkeeping simple.
Ultimately we're going to upgrade to a high-end RAID-5 Dell box with a few gigs of ram and quad processors, and then keep a second identical server mirrored to the first. That seems to me as the best solution to handling a growing number of accounts, while not having to worry about patching up 300 servers (like pair for example has to do) whenever a kernel patch or something comes out.
As long as load isn't a problem, and as long as there is a mirrored second box, and plenty of CPU power / RAID mirrors on the primary server, can you see any fall backs to using this idea?
To me it seems kinda silly to just keep adding separate machines, each one of which will need to talk to the control panel and each one of which we'll need to separately monitor and patch rather than buying a single very-redundant high-powered Dell server, even with a second identical one being mirrored every hour if need be.
Looking at Pair.com for example, it seems at least one or two of their 300 servers overloads once a day or more -- now if you can properly limit users' CGI's to make sure nothing spins out of control, and assure disk redundancy via RAID-5 or better, does anyone see any fallbacks to this other than the upfront costs?
I see lots of competitors throwing server after server after server at their clients, but to me that really seems a little redundant and having a single much-more-powerful server seems like a good idea. A properly configured quad or eight-processor machine should perform quite well, given that each user's CGI is limited.
Sincerely,
Vladislav Davidzon <davidzon@thinkhost.com> :-)
Senior Network Administrator - ThinkHost Web Hosting Services
http://www.thinkhost.com - honesty, reliability, trust.
We are the smart choice for all your web hosting needs! (TM)
[This message has been edited by thinkhost (edited 08-12-2000).]
Linear Mode
