How does one set up multiple servers?
 

Like one for the website and one for the db.
Also is the db server only for one db or can it house more than one?
When does one want to get a setup like this?
Would you recommend one when you have 1mill+ posts and 10k visits per day.

Thank you.

A 2 server setup is fairly simple... right now your forum is connecting to the local server, when you add a second machine for the database, your forum connects to that over an internal ip address. Your database server is just like a local database server, it can serve one db or twenty, although most of the time if you're splitting them out it's because you want more dedicated resources and don't want to be sharing them.

When do you do to this setup? When you need it either because you can see a slow down in services or because you forecast one (and hopefully not because your site is crashing from overload although that's often the case).

The number of visits and pageviews is telling but not the whole story. Sites running a barebones installs with short sessions might be able to do two, three, even four times the traffic of one with more features, addons or visitor activity. If your site runs well at that level there's little reason to make a change... if it doesn't then you should look at optimization options and if those are maxed out, a second server is probably the ideal solution.

We moved over to a two server setup when I started noticing that our server loads were constantly over 2 (and often sitting around 4 or 5) and we were noticing a slow down on the site that no amount of server optimization would fix. Oh, and also when we had enough money in the paypal account to afford the move.

>_<

Anyone know who I would go to, for a setup like that? <O.O> I don't know much about setting it up myself.

You need to get 2 dedicated servers. When you order them make sure they are either on the same vlan or are connected to a private switch. Once you get the server you install mysql on one of them and the webpages on the other. You set up the software to connect to the private IP of the server the db is on.

It's really not that difficult. Have your hosting provider configure a second server with the latest version of mysql setup and no other services running (i.e. no webserver, no mail server, no ftp) and link it over a vpn or internal network (something that avoids traffic having to go over any open network). Turn your forum off, copy your database to the new server and point vbulletin to it as well. Run a few tests and you're good to go.

If that's still more than you want to manage, you should be able to find someone in the Paid Requests forum who can assist.

And with more than 2 servers???? :)

With more than 2 you configure mysql to use the other servers as slaves. If you want to distribute the load you use a load balancer.

Your database server can house as many databases as the server can handle, there's no limit

Definitely agree on the Paypal comment. Once you can afford to move and you feel your forum isn't that fast, you probably should...no visitor wants to visit a slow forum. But you should be making money off your forum (ads/donations) before you consider moving)

The posts might qualify but your visitor count isn't that high yet. It also depends on what kind of server you have now.

If you don't know much about server setups, you can get "server management" from the hosting company. Or you can go for managed servers (which have the management portion built into the pricing)

Hope that helps.

I have 50k visitors and 1.6M posts, and I'm fine with one Xeon dual core server, but I switched over from apache to lighttpd.

I'm considering upgrading my server to a quad core one, it's still cheaper than a 2 machine array, but I believe I'd just need to point database in includes/config.php to the new DB server.

What about slave database? Does it relieve server load or it's just for backup purposes?