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Question Plesk "true" multi-server setup

ststudios

New Pleskian
Hi all,

I've been running a small managed web hosting business for clients for about a year and a half now, and I built it from the start on Plesk because of its flexibility and easy of administration. As my business has grown from hosting one site to fifteen, all varying in scale, I've spent the past couple months on and off looking into expanding my server architecture from just one VPS to two in front of a LoadBalancer to allow for redundancy and ensure I am delivering on my SLA to my clients.

I understand that Plesk "Multi Server" does not operate in this capacity, and instead shares the subscription load between multiple servers connected to a main control point. I find this to be the main hitch in my plan, as if one goes offline, that doesn't allow me to route all my traffic to the secondary server. As far as I can tell, running Plesk with any sort of LoadBalancer seems rather pointless as the servers themselves aren't actual full redundant copies -- it just spreads data around per each subscription. The few Plesk Feature Requests I've seen regarding this have either been closed due to lack of details, or simply not fully addressed. This has, albeit vaguely, been requested since back in 2013; it's clear there was a need then, and there still is a need now.

I came across this post from 2019 about Plesk surveying users of Multi-Server regarding scaling back current development of the add-in module and possibly looking at alternative solutions. So, has there been any progress made on this front? It seems to be a rather glaring issue to me that if one server goes down due to power, hardware, or software failures the entire compilation of subscriptions hosted on it goes down with it, especially when we have technologies such as AWS ELB etc. available at our architectural disposal.

In a similar vein, I know the "Synchronize Plesk Servers" feature request has gotten a massive amount of votes in response to this issue at-large, but that initial request was made in December 2013 and only recently was addressed in March 2020 by Plesk sending out a survey asking for more details...

I've seen a few suggestions to "implement rsync across servers" as a solution to this issue... There has to be a more reliable method than just shuttling files between servers to make them exact copies.

I'd appreciate any insight or guidance on this matter, as it's proven to be more than a bit frustrating.

Thanks!
 
Hey ststudios,
I'm in no way a systems engineer or something, I'm more of a 'pro user' and I also do managed hosting for clients through my agency.

But I think your need of redundancy is really based on rsync or some other file synchronizing technique. At least that's what I seem to hear about large sites which run on tens of separate servers. They all have their files synchronized, and they all connect to a single large database. But that would be ONE site only.

I don't think that solution is appropriate for what you described but I just wanted to drop my 2 cents on the issue. Also, have you thought about how you would deal with dynamic websites such as online stores?

I guess the best idea for you right now would be to simply run more servers with fewer clients, so you don't have a single point of failure which would take down a large amount of clients. You should also have frequent backups so you can rebuild a server whenever catastrophic failure arises.

But it seems like the best solution for you is really synchronizing both files and data.
 
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