The Doll Forum

Interesting read Phreddie

Yea, 4 gig database isn't a joke...
I ran a forum once but it wasn't this big. I think the database was around 500 mb when I couldn't keep up with all work due to my day job and sold the site.


I can really recommend virtual environments. In my day job we host professional enterprise applications either in custom servers running vmware behind the customers firewall or in Google cloud computing environment. So much flexibility that you get for free. Even if you don't enable things like load balancing, cluster, automatic failover etc.

For instance, want a test environment to test upgrades on. Well, snapshot. Spin up a new machine and do the test. If failed revert snapshot and go again etc.

Edit.
But I haven't worked with PHP and mysql in ages.
Now I primarily work with JavaScript (node and angular js), mongodb and c++ (that our core apps are written in)

when we moved to an even better server, I had thought of using virtual environments (Vmware, KVM, or even LXC), which is what I use for all my servers at home. The issue would be it would be hard to maintain for anyone aside from a decent linux admin. Things like cpanel and plesk make it easier for basic tasks to be handed off (new DB users or sites, mail users, FTP access, etc...). So splitting things up would mean re-creating management tools. I suppose we could use something like puppet to automate/keep general settings in sync across all sites, but that seems like overkill.