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I am contemplating migrating to mosso to have several cheap app servers.

The goal is to have a dedicated database server, however, does it make sense to have one database server that hosts the database needs of many different website servers (each having different websites on them)

Thanks.

phillc
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Its a very common way of doing it. It makes sense in number of ways

  • All databases are on the same server so backup is easier
  • You can have a secure, back-end database server, not connected to the internet directly and only accessible by the the web servers
  • You can specify your database server so that it is big enough to handle your data processing, whilst leaving your front end servers light and just processing web tasks
Sam Cogan
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It makes sense. That is the way we have it in our College, and that's the way many people/companies have it setup too. We have dedicated SQL servers, the same way we have dedicated web servers, etc. Mosso doesn't seem too cheap thought...

  • 1.5 cents an hour = $11 + change / month... how is that not cheap? – phillc May 08 '09 at 18:45
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    Actually Mosso is relatively inexpensive for a VPS if you're using low bandwidth. It's a base cost of $11/month plus bandwidth. – David Z May 08 '09 at 18:45
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IMHO, so long as the server can handle the load I prefer to centralize as much as possible. It tends to make my job easier and when that happens I can react faster and more efficiently when necessary.

There are downsides, especially in a shared environment. Of special note, consolidated environment downfalls include

  • higher security risks
  • higher risk of failure
  • a single failure can mean an outage for a larger percent of your userbase
  • for a consolidated db server, disk IO quickly becomes of paramount importance (ok, not necessarily a downfall, just a point to keep in mind)
squillman
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The biggest issue I can think of is security, and the questions that you need to consider are:

  • Does your company/organization have regulatory compliance to follow with regard to data storage/protect (sarbox, hipaa, etc)?

  • Will you need to separate and manage database access to different administrative users? That is, users in the database software itself, not just people users.

  • Is multi-tenant use a concern? This is related to the first Q above, but can be a separate issue if you're providing virtual hosting for web sites.

I don't see anything wrong with running multiple web sites off a single database server (though a single database is another story ;-)), as long as you consider the context of the data being stored and the security implications. The logistics of backup, maintenance/management and general administration can be mitigated through various tools automation techniques. Since you're talking about a cloud offering for this (Mosso), then you'll need to consider the performance implications as well.

jtimberman
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