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Hi everyone,
As a freelancer web-developer I have about ~20 websites, all php, most laravel based in a shared hosting package (running plesk). I recently had a falling out with my current server provider, plus I was getting fed up of some of the restrictions inherent to their setup, so I'm looking to move everything away from them.
I'm thinking of using Forge and am between having each website setup as an app in their own small server-let (Hetzner's cloud server, DO's Droplet, etc.), just putting them all in one server or a combination of those.
So far all of them together take about 10GB of space and consume less than 100GB/mo of traffic max, plus according to my hosting provider each app has 1 vCPU, 1.5GB RAM with a 4MB/s I/O and 30 entry processes, so both seem equally viable.
While I could just pull the gun and do either and then hit my head on the wall later, I would like to know if anyone has any experience and would like to share any suggestion or tips, so I can avoid even a little bit of headache...
I would look at 2 or 3 servers that you can spread your sites across. Then run different php/ mysql versions on each so that you have a home for older projects and can then move them across to a later version of php/mysql when they have been upgraded
@Snapey all of them can run on the latest version of PHP and as I will be migrating the DB I can upgrade those as well, so they could all go together or separately, at least as far as the tech stack goes. My only hesitation is that I do not know how to go about splitting them and what resources I should have for each server...
Are you planning to keep using a control panel like Plesk or are you going to host it without a hosting control panel?
@gych no, I do not plan on using any control panel, apart from the one from Forge. I have used it before for a different project and I found it much more flexible and useful than both cPanel and Plesk (with the exception of handling an email server, but I'd rather move all emails to a different service all together anyway)
I think I've understood that it sounds like you could go either way; put all your sites on one server or split them across multiple servers. As they sound like they've run happily together for a while then putting them on one feels like a viable option.
DO droplets are cheap and easy to scale, if you decided you needed to split them or needed to scale it is pretty trivial.
If you go down a single server route thinking you might need to deploy to different servers in the future and minimising down time is important then you might think about putting in a load balancer infront of the servers so you can migrate without the DNS hassle.
@robj load balancer for what? Are you suggesting I should spread out the same projects in multiple servers? I have honestly not thought of that as a possible solution.
@AntV My suggestion was less about using the load balancer to balance load, more that it allows you to direct traffic to different servers without having to wait for DNS changes to propagate.
So if you, say, want to have 2 servers initially and split your applications evenly across both, then in the future have the ability to consolidate to 1 server when you were happy a single DO droplet could handle the load, then, a load balancer would allow you to migrate an application from one server to the other without down time.
Having said all of that, it's a moving part which is only really necessary if minimising downtime is important and you are considering multi-server. If you can put up with 30 mins where you can't reach an app then I'd do without the complication.
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