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We do have some clients that are very concerned with security (fortune 100 banks), so I am hesitant to go the cloud computing direction. Our current server is

We do have some clients that are very concerned with security (fortune 100 banks), so I am hesitant to go the cloud computing direction. Our current server is powerful enough, but the challenge with a dedicated server is, how do you keep your site up if the hard drive fails? As far as EC2 I'm used to developing on a LAMP stack and I'm not sure what that transition would look like. We're a small shop (it's essentially me working as a full stack developer) so we don't have that many resources. Thanks for your insights!

MPSimmons 16y ago
With servers of even the low end of the middle, there should always be redundant system disks. The next step up in servers from what you have should use RAID-1 mirrored disks. Availability is a sliding scale in terms of reliability and money. You don't pay for stopping things that will happen, you pay to stop things that /could/ happen. The additional cost of a real RAID card plus an additional disk is insurance against the single drive failure that would make your machine unavailable. Your redundant power supplies do the same thing. As do your redundant NICs. Disaster planning is the art of asking, "What if..." and having answers. Of course, for every answer, a certain amount of money is required. My advice to you is to either go to the cloud now, before you invest more money in a physical infrastructure, or if thats not possible, buy "real" hardware and don't use what are essentially glorified laptops in a server case. Get a server that is rackmountable, has redundant hard drives (and if the server has system disks and data disks, configure it so that the system disks are a mirrored RAID-1 pair, and the data disks are not RAID-5), that has redundant power supplies, and redundant network cards. It really does sound expensive when you list it out like that, but those features are so standard that you can't really avoid them if you buy middle-class or higher servers. Here's a guest blog post I did on redundancy last year for SysAdvent: http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html

MPSimmons 16y ago

With servers of even the low end of the middle, there should always be redundant system disks. The next step up in servers from what you have should use RAID-1 mirrored disks. Availability is a sliding scale in terms of reliability and money. You don't pay for stopping things that will happen, you pay to stop things that /could/ happen. The additional cost of a real RAID card plus an additional disk is insurance against the single drive failure that would make your machine unavailable. Your redundant power supplies do the same thing. As do your redundant NICs. Disaster planning is the art of asking, "What if..." and having answers. Of course, for every answer, a certain amount of money is required. My advice to you is to either go to the cloud now, before you invest more money in a physical infrastructure, or if thats not possible, buy "real" hardware and don't use what are essentially glorified laptops in a server case. Get a server that is rackmountable, has redundant hard drives (and if the server has system disks and data disks, configure it so that the system disks are a mirrored RAID-1 pair, and the data disks are not RAID-5), that has redundant power supplies, and redundant network cards. It really does sound expensive when you list it out like that, but those features are so standard that you can't really avoid them if you buy middle-class or higher servers. Here's a guest blog post I did on redundancy last year for SysAdvent: http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-13-redundancy.html