[consulting] Dedicated/Colocated Servers?

[Boris Mann]

On 1/15/07, Greg Knaddison - GVS <Greg at growingventuresolutions.com> wrote:
> On 1/15/07, Mark Shropshire <mdshrops at shropnet.com> wrote:
> > I agree. The beauty of VPSs is that you can bring up various VPSs
> > each with their own purpose if needed. 1 for web, 1 for db, 1 for
> > LDAP, 1 for DNS, etc..  Make sure to request that each VPS runs on a
> > different hardware node so they all don't go down if there is an issue.
>
> I'm not sure the idea of putting the VPS on separate servers helps
> improve uptime.  If the chance of a server going down is the same for
> all servers, then sticking my web VPS on one physical machine and my
> DB VPS on another physical machine would double the occurrences of
> downtime in the case that my website is reliant on the DB (which is
> 99% true for Drupal sites - the 1% being boost or reverse-proxied
> sites).  Right?
>
> Or am I missing something?

It depends is the short answer. For example, we're working on mounting
the filesystem for Xen VPS from a high-reliability SAN. If the
physical processing box has issues, the image is stored externally,
and can be brought back up on another processing machine within
minutes.

But you are correct in that you have 2 single points of failure in
terms of services. Smaller machines set up in a clustered config are
much more reliable...depends on whether you are optimizing for
performance or reliability.

-- 
Boris Mann
Vancouver 778-896-2747
San Francisco 415-367-3595
Skype borismann
http://www.bryght.com