On 24 Sep 2009, at 16:30, James wrote:
...
So the best I can do is forward all traffic( 80, 443, etc) for the
group of websites to a proxy behind the firewall, then use software
such as what kashani suggested (proxypass, Squid, ngnix,
lighttpd, or Varnish) and parse the traffic with some form of
vhosts implementation on a single server (nated IP)?
I think you can simply forward to server A. If the site is on server A
then it's served, if it's on server B then in the vhosts for that site
on server A you can proxy for server B. Of course if server A goes
down then you're stuffed.
Then if the load of the combined virtual hostings becomes too large,
I use a group (cluster) of servers that and implement some sort of
load
balancing across the machines that each contain complete copies of
each website?
Then there is the question of how to keep the individual machines
'in sync' and the limitation that once a machine is saturated
(performance
suffers too much due to insufficient resources) there
is no solution for expansion?
This surely exceeds what you'll be hosting on a NATted home connection?
One last thing. I can get a small subnet of say 5 IP address from my
ISP for an additional 20/month. That that help me? I want to put up
dozens of small charitable web sites. None will have a huge user base,
but I was going to stream some limited video from each of them.
Yes, this certainly overcomes the original problem. You have a
separate IP for each server and the DNS for each site directs
appropriately.
Not all routers support this configuration and, 5 years ago, I found
it a little cumbersome to set it up in Linux (it's called "bridging").
No doubt the situation has improved a lot since then.
Stroller.
