Last night I got an account at Rackspace Cloud and created three brand new CentOS Linux servers. Now I have to set them up: two web servers and one database server. My goal: Move Spaniards.es website to this new hosting.
Why move?
Currently I am hosting Spaniards.es on two dedicated servers at Ace-Host.net. So far, so good, but the site has started to get slow (more the web server than the db server, which is running great so far). Some days I found the site running at 30 times the processor capacity (according to ‘top’), which is a lot. The biggest problem I have right now is the caching on the web server. I have installed both XCache and Memcached, but can get them to work since that server was my first ever dedicated server an has a CPanel installation that drives me nuts.
Sooner or later I had to move that webserver into a new clean installation, but I have decided that if I have to move, I’ll do it to a cloud. No more dependencies on a physical hardware, no more worries.
Why not EC2
Well, I’ve ried EC2 and it is not that I don’t like it. It is just that it is so much work. After seeing how CloudServers work on RackSpace, I have no doubt.
When is Spaniards.es going to be moved?
There is no date yet. First I have to set up the servers, make sure everything works fine, set up the domains, dns, mail, etc. Hopefully in a couple of weeks, if I can find enough time to do so.
Never heard of them. It seems quite good choice.
Hope to hear back from you about the experience moving.
Actually, I think it will be really interesting as well a micropost or something about how many users and how much CPU/Memory/DB/Disk/bandwidth is, a successful page like Spaniards currently using.
Everything is going well so far, although I haven’t decided the final configuration yet. CloudServers can be scaled up to 16GB of RAM, which is amazing. My 2 dedicated servers have 4 GB each, although it’s not fully used on the DB server.
Combining them on a single server would give me a lot of speed since the latency from communications between server and server will be gone.
In the other hand, staying with 2 servers has the advantage of horizontal scaling. It would be fairly easy to add new web servers, which is the one that is overloaded now. Bandwidth between servers is free at RackspaceCloud. I just need to do some testing for caching. So far I’ve got memcached working, but not sure how Drupal will handle it. Have to do some testing.
Regarding the stats, I think it’s a good idea. Posting something soon :)
Really appreciate your comment!
I think having an scalable architecture is great, less pain for the future, great way to handle overloads without any effort. You will never die by success ;)
Quite interesting, so far ;)
Ok, so as an update, seems like Drupal 6.15 still has a lot of issues with PHP 5.3. Seems like the core is fine, but there are tons of errors in other modules, themes, etc.
So I moved down from Fedora 12 to Fedora 11, which comes with PHP 5.2 by default.
Ok, so I finally moved Spaniards.es to RackspaceCloud. After some minor issues, everything seems to be working fine now. From 2 dedicated servers now I have 6 cloud servers: 3 web servers, 1 db server, 1 file server and 1 load balancer.