Use of Drupal is exploding here at UC Berkeley. The campus doesn't have a good solution for Drupal hosting in place. For the past year it has been my vision to create an environment to do Drupal hosting the right way. I have done a lot of work an have some solutions in place. Now we want to get our plans reviewed reviewed by a LAMP/Drupal systems expert. Does anyone have recommendations for a systems consultant?
More about the advice we are looking for:
We'd like to bring up a shared hosting solution using VPSs. UCB has a demand for numerous small Drupal sites with relatively low resource usage. (More complex sites will run on separate custom VPSs.) We think that setting up a shared hosting environment which can scale horizontally would be a good approach. Shared LAMP hosting presents challenges:
* Apache/PHP security. Interested in using something like apache2-mpm-itk
* Apache/MySQL tuning for this environment. Consideration of Pressflow/Varnish...
* User security and resource management. Chroot jail. Quota. Ulimit.
* Load balancing/proxy. Apache mod_proxy, heartbeat
* System monitoring. Munin.
The above is where we are most interested in advice. Below is a little more info about the solution we've been working with.
Scaling horizontally: New VPSs deployed using Puppet.
Backups: Duplicity
OS Updates: Canonical's Landscape service.
The Aegir Hosting System used to provision new platforms and sites.
Site migration and version control. We are experimenting with a combination of Subversion and drupal.org/project/dbscripts
Comments
Instead of spending a huge
Instead of spending a huge amt of time to setup accounts/vhost/jailed environments, etc. Why not just set up a beefy machine with cPanel installed?
Yeah, not to dumb down this
Yeah, not to dumb down this seemingly ambitious project, I have to say that a reseller package with WHM administration from hostgator meets all of my drupal hosting needs.
I can easily run 100 different drupal installs on one plan for about 35 bucks a month.
Want scalability? Buy more plans. Now I'm being facetious...
Fun with Gmap
Cloud servers
Have you considered cloud server service? It combines the best of shared and non-shared server hosting services. There was a good presentation on this subject during BADCamp09 by Josh Koenig, you can follow this link to learn more about it: http://badcamp.net/session/drupal-cloud
Yes
Yes I'm very interested in Pantheon and Project Mercury. University policy presents a mountain of red tape if I want to buy cutting-edge services like this. Basically every click-thru agreement has to be scrutinized by Procurement. There are also some issues with sensitive data that make it better to run our own systems--at least from a policy perspective...
Let us help you put it inside the u?
Hey Brian: we'd love to help you adopt the same techinques we run internally. It might be a fun exercise to support. :)
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com
Sliced Virtual Servers
If you are at UC Berkely you probably have one resource a regular start up does not; rack space, power and bandwidth. Clouds are awesome for individuals and nimble companies starting up with little cash and the ability to click agreements. Why not create your own version of slicehost.com. Start with one big bad server and dole out virtual servers. You can create a high performance stack with a favorite linux distro as a starting point with students. Personally I would be using ubuntu but as someone with zero experience solaris I hear its version of the xen hypervisor would probably be a better bet on the back end. The best part is a student, program or professor could take there image when they leave, or as the paths are created by developers in the future click a button and move it to there own amazon cloud service account. Also if a site or program grows they have a ready to go image to move onto its own hardware as the need arises. As a shared hosting user I just moved one of my sites to a rented vm so I could have Mysql and Drupal on the same server (until of course the site grows) there is a huge speed gain even with minimal memory, plus one can tinker with Solr and other technologies that are not available in the shared hosting world and lets face it in your environment everyone has there own idea of what a perfect setup is and will want to tinker.
Mike Hathaway
mike@mikehathaway.com
http://www.mikehathaway.com
Owning your server
I agree investing on a server for in-house web hosting (or even use it for other services) is the most cost effective and gives you the complete control. These days you can get a server for under $350 and connect it to the UC Berkeley network with your own IP. Of course I don't know the red tape involved in this option....