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I currently have a website hosted on a dedicated server which is under a lot pressure due to high amount of visitors. What I need to do is to have a backup server in order to serve the visitors in case that our main server is not able to respond.
I would appreciate it if someone could provide me a complete guide or just point me to the right direction.

Note that I'm fairly new to server administration subjects so please bear with me.

2hamed
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  • Why the downvote?! – 2hamed Jun 10 '13 at 09:19
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    Mouse over the down arrow; the usual reasons (which may be assumed to be true, if no other comment is given) are "this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". I wouldn't presume to comment on the latter, but it definitely shows no research effort whatsoever. SF expects people to try to help themselves before asking concrete questions, instead of just flopping into the lap of the community and gasping "*please provide me a complete guide*". – MadHatter Jun 10 '13 at 10:02
  • @MadHatter so explain him and guide him. He can edit his post if he's wrong, but if won't explain him, what the point of this community at all? – holms Jun 10 '13 at 11:29
  • holms, I take your point - though I notice you've not posted an answer - but I'd point you to the debate in several recent threads on http://meta.serverfault.com/, and in particular on Iain's resignation and the recent moderator election. SF does seem to be hardening in its attitude to questions where someone outlines a large problem and then wants to be spoon-fed every step of the answer. I don't intend to recap any of those discussions in this comment, but I do think you should read them. The other downvote and close votes already on this question suggests that some others agree with me. – MadHatter Jun 10 '13 at 11:39
  • Since when spoon-fiding is not encouraged in here? I've been in here since ages and this community was great about "spoon fiding" , when you really got problems with understanding things, somebody could come from heaven to earth and explain the root of my problem, instead of closing topics and saying "get out and google more". pathetic if everything is went against "spoon fiding". – holms Jun 10 '13 at 11:45
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    I really do encourage you to read those threads on meta, to get a better understanding of some of the concerns. Spoonfeeding isn't discouraged where a couple of spoonfuls will get the person up and running, but spoonfeeding where the person's after a five-course dinner, plus breakfast and a light lunch - these questions are becoming excessive. The FAQ is pretty clear that "questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much." - and (imo) "how do I load-balance a website" is in that category. Others may disagree, though! – MadHatter Jun 10 '13 at 11:55
  • I understand that my question might be too vague here but believe you me when I say I have done my research. I don't say I could find anything but all of them are either too limited or too advanced for me to make sense of. So I had no choice to ask it here. I will try to improve my question however to meet the SF criteria. – 2hamed Jun 11 '13 at 05:28

3 Answers3

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I'd suggest you to use a combination of multiple Server with a Nginx Frontend which has multiple upstreams. With that you can reduce the load of one Server and share it. An alternative Software to use with multiple Servers is HAProxy. But I haven't used it yet.

If you don't want to setup mutiple Servers you can use Cloudflare. They have a pretty decent free plan.

m4rcs
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  • @Hamed this is more possible solution for you. Usually you've got multiple up-streams running to split load balancing, or just for balancing traffic between continent. – holms Jun 10 '13 at 11:31
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Round-Robin DNS could be a solution.

user117882
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  • It's not really satisfactory from a load-balancing point of view, although it is possible, under some circumstances to alter the DNS response based on a system healthcheck of the backend webservers. – Tom O'Connor Jun 10 '13 at 09:36
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There's lots of technologies whch could be the answer here - load balancing, round robin DNS, failover, cloud services, tuning your existing installation, content delivery networks, shared filesystems, server clustering, SSL acceleration....the question is far too generic in its current form to even guess at what the right direction to solving your problem is.

As a minimum you should have given some indication of what your platform does (is it dynamic - does it need a database, what kind) even if you're not constrained by any current code base, and where the current bottlenecks are. The other questions any competent system architect would be asking are what constraints (money, skills, time) do you operate under. But even with all this information, it would still be too sweeping a question to answer here.

MadHatter
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symcbean
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