XenForo.com's server setup

[Julio Franco]

I saw your brief announcement about moving to "a new, very much more powerful server" (by @Kier)
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/new-server.152722/

I just happen to be looking at a few alternatives for our server infrastructure, migrating away from a pure "bare metal" setup to some combination of edge, load balancing and cloud servers (with bare metal doing the heavy lifting at the bottom).

I was wondering, what do you guys use that secures uptime on the frontend but also gives you flexibility for software updates, development, staging and so on.

Thank you.

 

[Sam9]

I sysadmin for a forum which gets 4m+ uniques /m. We use almost exclusively bare metal, with carefully chosen providers in order to minimize costs without impacting uptime. I notice you're using Softlayer, who are great but definitely on the pricey side.

We have a handful of webservers running nginx+php-fpm, database server with elasticsearch and memcached, NFS (tried using lsyncd but kept running into problems), and some auxiliary services with everything connected by a 10Gbps switch.

We have failover with the webservers, but not with the database server, although we make use of dual PSUs. Eventually I'd like to move us to a master:master replication setup for the database, but that isn't viable at the moment.

With dev and staging, this can be done however you like, eg using an automatic git checkout, or whatever fits best for your development process. Our dev site is hosted on the same servers as the live site, as it makes the most sense for us. You could easily move this to a VPS, but having everything on the same cluster certainly simplifies things.

If you mix cloud and bare metal, depending on how you plan on setting it up and with which provider, be sure to factor in the latency between the two, as that can have a significant impact on performance.

Also Cloudflare is incredibly useful, not only for the CDN and DDoS protection, but their extra features like load balancing is rather powerful and much much cheaper compared to hardware alternatives.