Hello Everyone,
Over the past month there have been several topics going back and forth, from selling Ad space to finding a way that we can make this place fully community supported. MannDude and I have been going back and forth in private message for a few weeks now on this topic and we thought that it would be something that we should allow the community to have some input on.
Currently vpsBoard's infrastructure is relatively small, as the site is hosted on a BuyVM 256Mb KVM instance and using BuyVM's offloaded MySQL services for MySQL. So far this has been a more than reasonable start, however, going forward as this community grows, this will need to change to keep things moving and working at reasonable speed.
My proposal to MannDude was to create a cluster of servers, instead of using just one or two large servers. Now there are probably many ways to do this, but we are discussing using not only the services that are the topic of this board (VPS) but also trying to keep this as low cost and community driven as possible. There has recently been a few different posts on Varnish here, so as you can imagine this is one of the parts that was discussed.
So, my proposed method was to use several DDOS protected VPS server as reverse proxy entry ways, with several backend web servers to provide the non-static content and use at least two reasonably sized SSD VPS servers in a Master-Master replication to provide the MySQL services needed by the cluster. On the reverse proxy using Varnish and Haproxy (to provide better session control as forums are very dependent on session cookies).
When discussing it with MannDude I threw together a quick Visio drawing of what this might look like, to give you a better idea of what I am talking about graphically. You can find the drawing
here.
About this point, you are probably wondering, what does this have to do with me? Right?
One of the reason I suggested this clustered method is because we would be able to allow providers and community members alike who would like to contribute to this infrastructure an opportunity to do just that. For the back end servers we could allow the community to provide these instances, allowing the cost to MannDude to be reduced. Okay, so now your next question is likely. "How do we do this while being provider neutral?" Well, using this type of setup would allow people to contribute resources in an anonymous manner as the only ips the members see when coming to the site would be those of our entry proxy servers and not those of the backend resources. Meaning, anyone who is willing to contribute is not going to be directly advertised, however, MannDude has said he will give an honorable mention to those who do decide to help (we have not yet determined how that would be displayed). Those who do contribute also can not claim to host the site them selves, as it would be a distributed infrastructure. In a case where say one contributor is not able to provide said service any longer, we could remove it from the cluster and still continue to run without much immediate effect. Then, as we can, replace the node with a new contributed server.
All this said, maybe the way I have mentioned is not the best way and is certainly not the only way, so at the same time I am bringing this option to you, we are still very much open to some more suggestions on how this can be done or even made better. So please, leave feedback, make suggestions and lets come up with a way to keep this a community initiative instead of having to have Ads plastered everywhere.
Also, if this is an interest to you and you wish to help build this infrastructure or help to maintain it and you have some skill sets you would be willing to offer
for free to help us out, please speak up and let us know.
