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I recently installed Expression Engine and am loving it so far. I am currently using this in an outsourced hosted environment, but for many reason we will be bringing up servers to run it at my work. We have been debating the ideal server set-up and I have a question from my server admin…

If I run a server with Expression Engine locally, only accessible by my developers, can I then mount those Expression Engine files as a read-only volume on another server running Apache. Could I then serve out the files in a read/execute only environment? I understand I may need two licenses, but is there any reason this couldn’t work?

Hi, tgw108 - welcome to the forums!

No, you can not do this and ExpressionEngine is not engineered to work this way.  ExpressionEngine needs write capability for things like building caches, uploading images for the file upload wizard, gallery, avatars, signatures, and photo members, and other operations.

One of our top priorities is to build a secure system; as long as you run it on servers that are also secure, then this should not pose a problem for you.  I would recommend looking at EngineHosting as one great possibility.

You might like to review this documentation comment regarding write permissions as well.