Hello everyone!
I'm looking for some help/suggestions for servers. I have 3 sites, which will all be running Drupal, and I am mainly interested in utilizing Mercury for 1 of those sites (the other are very small scale sites). That one site gets massive traffic boosts for a few months of the year around my company's trade show.
I have been looking to host in the cloud, and have been looking at Rackspace cloud servers as well as Voxel Voxcloud. I am not a full-fledged sysadmin but I have have setup a few unmanaged boxes before, yet not at this scale. Cost is a factor. This plan is part of a complete re-factoring of my company's web presence, and I would like a platform that will let us scale and move forward without being hindered by server limitations.
Questions:
Can I host all of these sites from one server? If yes, does that require multisite, or can i use seperate codebases?
Opinions on rackspace vs. voxel?
Can you think of a better layout?
Also, I will have a need for a development and preferably a staging environment as well, cost depending.
Comments
Yes,
Drupal (or Pressflow) + Domain Access http://drupal.org/project/domain module could be your answer.
With Domain Access module;
- You can host all sites with one Drupal/Pressflow codebase. (Yes, you can choose separate codebases for each sites, too.)
- You can choose whichever "one database for all the sites" or "separate databases for each sites".
Or just multisit
you don't need to complexity of Domain Access if these are separate sites. Just use the standard multisite technique. You will need to create vhost records/etc for each site, but if you are familiar with administering Apache it's pretty standard.
If you're not familiar with sysadmin, you may want to get someone else to help you out, or else be prepared and excited to take on a learning curve. ;)
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
Thanks for the comments! I
Thanks for the comments!
I would really like not open the pandora's box that is the domain module :) and multisite is an option, but i'm wondering whats going to happen when I'd like to launch a D7 site on the same server along side of my optimized Mercury sites.
Ryan Hartman
Web Developer
www.devkinetic.com
I'm kind of in the same
I'm kind of in the same boat... I want to host some of my freelance client sites, but $50 per month is about the sweet spot for me. That gets me a single 512MB (dv) - Dedicated virtual - server from Media Temple, or about 2 cloud servers from Rackspace... I'm not very experienced with Apache, but can find my way around when needed. My perfect solution would be one that I don't have to worry too much about configuring mysql and apache for performance. (A developer can dream...)
Anyway - Josh, it's nice to see you posting here. I've been following the Pantheon project for a while and I was wondering what the latest was? I'd love to be able to deploy it into the Amazon or Rackspace cloud, and have the power of the cloud behind the db and web servers. (With Rackspace, they will most likely recommend I use a dedicated server for the database and cloud servers for web heads.)
What are your thoughts? This sounds similar to what devkinetic was wondering too - it sounds like we are in the same boat. Thanks for your insight!
As an alternative, I've also
As an alternative, I've also been looking into Omega8. It's not quite Mercury, but its a managed solution and damn fast.
Ryan Hartman
Web Developer
www.devkinetic.com