Hosting
public
group: Newspapers on Drupal
johsw@drupal.org - Tue, 2007-03-06 22:08
Just wanna hear about your experience with hosting drupal.
Our current (non-drupal) site is hosted on our own server. Right now our article archive has more than 120.000 db rows taking up more than 1.6 gb. We have close to 30.000 registered users. So far this has worked out ok, but because we expect our new drupal site (which is still under development) to demand more of the server, we're thinking about outsourcing hosting.
Are you hosting in house or have you outsourced? If you outsourced, what hosting service do you use? If you're hosting inhouse what are your spec's?
Hope to hear from you all :-)
Greetings from Copenhagen
/J.
Insourcing
We're running Drupal inhouse, on a cluster of several Linux servers with a separate database server. Sorry, I don't have specs, just the configuration -- we're using a router that allocates normal page requests to any of the servers, and POST requests only to the master server (the others have read-only NFS mounts). I think we have about 50 installs either up and running or pending on that box. Databases are served from a separate Linux box that can scale to a cluster as well. This system serves the fairly high-traffic SavannahNow.com site and low-traffic blogs.{sitename}.com for most of our other newspapers and some non-newspaper sites.
BlufftonToday.com, which was our first Drupal project, is still running on an outsourced server (Server Beach) -- a single AMD-processor Linux system running both the application and the database. It's snoozing.
MySQL 5 cluster
We already had the Drupal front-end on all of the servers in our in-house server farm and are now getting ready to migrate the back end to a two-server MySQL 5 cluster. Over the past few months, we've had some fun getting Slashdotted and Dugg and even Farked (yes, the trifecta of server overloads!) all at once.
If anybody's running Drupal off a clustered database, I'd be grateful for any tips or gotchas we should look out for. So far the biggest issue seems to be the need to basically bring over each table by hand because, I gather, clustered MySQL 5 and plain old MySQL 4 have some different conventions for things such as field names (IT has gratefully accepted my decision to stay as far away as possible from the actual migration, given my amazing abilities to get Drupal to take the entire site down).This'll also make adding modules in the future more interesting - I won't be able to just upload them to the farm and then click on a box in the Drupal admin panel.