Hello all, Im looking for you thoughts about single vs. multiple machines with ISPconfig. I have a small "hosting" company. Right now I resell through another company doing virtual hosting. I recenlty purchased some new(used) equipment with the intent of hosting my own sites. Here is what i have. 1 HP DL360 dual 1.3 with 2GB of RAM 36GB HD (intended for mail hosting) 1 HP DL360 dual 1.3 with 2GB of RAM 36GB HD (intended for web/db hosting) 2 Compaq deskPro EN workstations (PIII 900/ 512MB Ram/ 30GB HD) (primary and secondary DNS) I installed Fedora Core 6 (easy and polished ...so im told) on all 4. Now, I had them all setup and working except for the virtual mail hosting, using various tools and config utilities (im pretty new to linux)...So i started looking at control panels because my customers are used to CPanel. Thats how I found ISPConfig. Normally this would be too complicated for me, but Falko's Setup Guide was there waiting for me. Ok so i go throught the setup and get ISP installed and mostly working (still working out some mail server bugs) and it seams to work great and certainly looks great, although it lacks some features of CPanel it's much better than no control at all... Finally....here comes the question... ALL my serving task are now on one box, and as noted above, my "server machines" are exactly top of the line... Is this a normal Business enviroment to have all tasks on one server? And am i just in the dark here (being used to Win2K/2k3) and having multiple machines dedicated to certain tasks? I would like to know your thoughts... Thanks for reading this far, David
All depends on your requirements (and your customers), but you have 4 servers and only use one? If that one breaks, you're complete out of business I assume you have hosted your servers in a external datacenter and you have at least one public IP address per server. If not, you're more or less stuck to one server. You should at least use two servers for DNS. You can split web serving and mail handling on different servers. You can spread different websites across different servers (E.g. I have different servers for a Perl based CMS and PHP based websites). That way you can share the risk of failures and having a server crash will not put all your sites and services out of order. Setting up a real business environment is a complex task which requires a lot of planning and careful usage of resources.
Thanks for your thoughts... and yes i have public IP's for all 4 machines, and I have arrangements with a co-location center to house my equipment...that is when i get it working. As I said, I was using all 4 to do different tasks. Now i only use 1 (actually i still use a second name server) But this is only because I'm trying to use ISPconfig as a CP. Is there a better way to setup IPSConfig so that it can use multiple machines? or load balance/fail over ? If there was i would like to do that. David
Current ISPC can not handle multiple systems. Of course you can install ISPconfig on all systems, but you manage 1 system only per installation. So you would have 4 seperate ISPCongfig installs. ISPC3 is said to be able to manage across servers. But that's under heavy development at the moment
Well I am also new to ISPConfig. We currently use a different CP (bluequartz)with no way of having resellers. This has become a kind of pain for us and some developers we host for. We just started hosting our email on different servers than web. This way if there site is down there email should not be and viseversa. We recently started using the qmailtoaster install for email and like it so far. Like I said we are trying out ISPconfig with some internal site's and like it so far. We have some developers who develop on Fedora's bleeding edge and this is another reason we are trying ISPConfig because of support with Fedora. Hopefully this helps some.
