Discussion: Cluster Hosting
Posted on January 12th, 2008
We have seen more companies come online last year with a grid, cloud, cluster technologies for shared hosting. This services consists of multiple Apache servers, a few database and email servers. Their is usually a load balance and failover component to it as well. Some of the providers do this through hardware where others do it through software.
I have been tracking up time for all of these new services and their support notices. So far the service does not appear to be a production ready service from the indication of the downtime and issues pushed out through support notices.
One of the problems I have with Clusters in a shared environment is that they create a large single point of failure which can kill your entire business. Where separate servers in separate data centers means you do not have one single point of failure.
I think that Clusters for shared hosting is still a ways away before it makes sense.
What do you think?
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11 Comments
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(mt) seems to do it well…
The only point of failure seems to be the datacenter, since (with (mt) at least) if a server in the cluster goes down, everything keeps on humming along. Then again, I’m not sure…
You should subscribe to their feed for a month and then tell me the same thing. Their clusters have lots of problems that people are paying them to beta test.
I said “seems”. :P
Hey, TechCrunch and other “crunch network” sites are hosted by (mt), so it couldn’t be that bad. The again, they probably have a custom cluster “solution”.
I’m sure they have their own cluster solution with a 1Gig pipe.
Is what Netfirms is offering under it’s Enterprise label the same thing along this line of thinking? I had been considering it because of the ability to utilize both windows and unix platforms at the same time as a reseller. I wasn’t aware that this was beta technology.
The service from Netfirms (although I have not used it) appears to be something very experimental. Pulling all that together into one would be a nightmare with multiple technical challenges.
I would also question the easy of use of the control panel over these various systems and if each domain would have it’s own control panel if you plan on reselling it.
Netfirms has no public way to see how their servers are doing so I have not be tracking it.
It’s not really beta technology, Google does it, and they have very little downtime. Then again, they have 100’s of Computer Engineers working on it. :P
Is there software for custering server’s together?
I didn’t realize we were talking about search engines. :P
I know in the shared hosting environment clusters are still beta for most companies.
We were talking about the technology though. :P Google just happens to be a perfect example of a perfectly fine cluster.
The advantages seem to out-way the disadvantages, though.
We have 2 perfectly working clusters as well but they would not work well in a shared hosting enviroment.
Imagine if you had a system like Netfirms setup and one portion of your system fails. Instead of having 100 or so customers to support on one server you now have all of your customers requesting support once.
What about using RAID-1 for each drive, but having the other drive be in a different physical server, so if one of the server’s goes down in the cluster, that data can still be accessed from the server that has the duplicate drive in it?