1 site on multiple web servers?

[Gutspiller]

I wasn't sure about posting this here or in webmastering, but that forum seemed more on programming and on web server maintaining.

Basically, I have a site that has grown large and I'm not a programmer myself. I've upgraded my dedicated server as much as the host will allow.

Does anybody know of some 3rd party service that would allow you to have 2 or more servers setup that have the exact same content on them and this "service" makes it so that as visitors come to the site it alternates which server they're taken to so that the bandwidth, processing, etc. is split between 2+ servers? I thought something like this existed as a service and somehow did it through DNS, but I wasn't sure.

I don't want to switch hosts, so I'm hoping it's not host dependent, but I need to find something as we grow.

Thanks for any help people can toss out to me.

 

[Qualm]

Its called load balancing, and there are some hosting companies which support it but not many. Check out what Amazon is now offering for dynamic server provisioning - sorry I don't have a link handy.

 

[nexusalt]

Not sure of host's that do it off hand, but here's how to do it if you want to tackle it.

http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_loadbalanced_apache_cluster

 

[Doliviss]

We use WebMUXs for our dedicated server clients that need such a thing here at work.

 

[moetop]

DNS round robin ??

 

[Ockie]

If you are looking for a manged co-located or setup hosting solution, let me know.

What you are looking for sounds more like a load balanced setup in a farm type senario.. this will also increase your uptime as you can locate that other server in another data center and if one server was to fail, you'd still have an online site.

 

[Xipher]

There are a few different ways to achieve it, which the ones I know of have been brought up already. The two common ones I know of are DNS round robin (which is something HardOCP appears to be using). Then there is also utilizing a server to multiplex the connections, which is what the WebMUX does that was mentioned earlier. A free solution is available using OpenBSD (I don't know if the software has been ported to any of the other BSDs since it was only recently adopted) which has the application hoststated.

 

[moetop]

There is also Linux Virtual server. You may want to do a Google search on linux content switching.