Setting up server to be scalable

June 14, 2014 4.5k views
Nerull
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Nerull
Hi, im setting up a website that will initially start out small but parts of it will need upgrading sooner then others. For example my forums will most likely remain small, my shop will hopefully grow to be a decent site and my video sharing section will prob be medium sized. My thoughts were to set it up with the following $5 droplets and upgrade them as they become to small. 1. db server droplet 2. shop 3. video 4. forums/main portal I would also like an email server on there somewhere. I was hoping to have this set up so that it will all be www.example.com, www.example.com/forums /videos /store so i can use 1 ssl cert for them all. My main question is, is this overkill? would i be better off putting 1,2,4 on the 1 droplet and the videos on another? And on a technical points would i just use a .htaccess redirect on 4 to have the others as subfolders? Would the ssl cert work over multiple servers like this?
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1 Answer
asb MOD June 17, 2014
That sounds like a reasonable set up. You could probably condense things a bit it you wanted to. If you go that route, I'd argue for keeping the database server on a separate droplet. Check out this article for a good starting off point on thinking about different setups: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/5-common-server-setups-for-your-web-application SSL certificates are bound to a hostname, not the server. So it's fine to use one on multiple servers. As for using .htaccess redirects, I'm personally a fan of subdomains for this sort of thing, eg: store.example.com and videos.example.com Than you can just use ServerName directives in your VirtualHosts.
5 Common Server Setups For Your Web Application
by Mitchell Anicas
When deciding which server architecture to use for your environment, there are many factors to consider, such as performance, scalability, availability, reliability, cost, and ease of management. Here is a list of commonly used server setups, with a short description of each, including pros and cons. Keep in mind that all of the concepts covered here can be used in various combinations with one another, and there is no single, correct configuration.
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