I was wondering if any of you seasoned admins could compare these 2 approaches in terms of speed, bandwidth usage, security etc. I have an idea but don’t really know enough to take action so maybe you could point out advantages and disadvantages of each option in general. Also, more specifically, if I want to serve a few domains with very low traffic from apache in droplet A, while storing the files on droplet B, what 'd you recommend? Thanks in advance.
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The two are unrelated.
Can you describe what problem you’re trying to solve?
(AKA, why can’t you do this on one droplet, what do you hope to achieve with a second one, etc)
The situation is something like that: two small-scale droplets, A and B. A runs apache and a few low traffic domains. B runs only mysql and a few other maintenance services.
Both have very low average CPU usage. As for the disk space, droplet A is starting to run low while droplet B still has a lot of free space. So I could make a NFS mount to access disk B on droplet A and use it to serve one or two low traffic domains. I guess this could be achieved through private networking too. Is this a really bad idea? Thanks again.
Just came across this answer and decided to write some general guidelines for anyone who comes across this in the future despite the old question.
If you have a few domains with very low traffic, then either approach would be fine. However, if you are concerned about bandwidth usage or security, then I would recommend using option 2.
Here is a table summarizing the advantages and disadvantages of each option:
| Factor | Option 1 | Option 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Simplicity | Simple | More complex |
| Speed | Fast (if droplet A has sufficient resources) | Slower |
| Bandwidth usage | High | Low |
| Security | Low | High |
If you want to serve a few domains with very low traffic from Apache in droplet A, while storing the files in droplet B, I would recommend using option 2. You can use NFS or SSHFS to mount the files from droplet B to droplet A.
Here are the steps on how to do this:
- Install the NFS or SSHFS client on droplet A.
- Create an NFS or SSHFS share on droplet B.
- Mount the NFS or SSHFS share on droplet A.
- Configure Apache to serve the files from the mounted share.
I hope this helps!
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