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Good afternoon,

Not sure if this is the appropriate forum to post this question, if not let me know and I will repost.

We are planning to use EE as our enterprise CMS solution, and will be hosting it in-house. I am being asked by our system Admins for the “best practices” server infrastructure configuration for a load balanced website with high availability and redundancy. We are looking at a 3-tier LAMP installation. So, that being said…

How many servers are recommended?
Does EE need to run on the web server(s) or can it run on a separate server?
If it’s running separately; will dynamic content still be served if that server goes down?
Any recommendation on DB redundancy/clustering?

I’m sure I’ve missed a few thing, but it’s a start. Thanks in advance!

Jorge

Hi, Jorge -

We are not able to make recommendations on server infrastructure or environmental tuning.  You can certainly search the forums for “load balanc” (leaving off the e gets you balance and balancing) and look for posts by Nevin Lyne, who runs EngineHosting, as they’re a great source of information.

Other than that, I’d recommend working with an administrator well versed in running dynamic systems, and get things set up that way.

Post back if you have any other questions!

How many servers are recommended?
Does EE need to run on the web server(s) or can it run on a separate server?
If it’s running separately; will dynamic content still be served if that server goes down?
Any recommendation on DB redundancy/clustering?

All that depends on a number of items. Hardware and IT budget, server traffic (how many users), and how valuable the content is, and how important that the content be available to all users 24/7.

At the low end, it’s rather easy, even with a simple Mac mini or PC running Linux, hooked into a network, to get 99.9% uptime with Apache, PHP, MySQL and EE all on the same box. A requirement of 99.99% takes more work, requires redundant servers, catastrophic back up and restore procedures, and so on. It can get as complicated and as expensive as you want.

A good IT pro who understands your situation should be able to guide you toward an appropriate hardware architecture.