[LRUG] What's the best way to go from 1 server to 2?

[Andrew Stewart]

Good afternoon El Rug,

What's the best way to increase from one server to two?

Currently I have everything for my webapp – code, database, background jobs, etc – on one server.  Performance is fine but it's a single point of failure (see this morning's email thread).  Off the top of my head I'm thinking:

- Use a different host in a different city from my current server.
- Install same operating system as current server and set up identically via Chef/whatever.
- Deploy all code changes to both servers with Capistrano but have second server serving Rails maintenance page (just in case anybody finds it).
- Ideally set up live (mysql) replication...somehow.
- If/when first server croaks, manually fail over to second server via changing DNS.

I'm sure it's more complicated than that, particularly the switching from one server to the other (and back).  Does anybody have any tips?

Thanks again,

Andy Stewart