: How should I add further servers to support potential increases in traffic to my website? New here but I post on StackOverflow pretty often. The scenario: I am a paying customer of linode.

@Megan663

Just buy a bigger linode to expand my website. Double the power means that the server can handle twice as many users, right?


Increasing server capacity is certainly easier. It sounds like you have a small enough server that it would be cost effective as well. Generally, I would recommend increasing your server first, then load balancing once that is no longer cost effective.


This wouldn't involve buying any additional private IP addresses either, would it?


There are no additional IP addresses required when you stick to a single (larger) server.


Buy the node balancing package from linode to expand my website? Does this mean I have to clone my current disk image and distribute it to all new linodes I buy?


Even with a load balancer there are many resources that must be shared between the two:


A single database
A place to put user uploaded files
Session data


Your code will probably have to change to handle cases in which resources are no longer local.


If this is the case, how do I handle newly uploaded user files? Should I have a linode especially for this too?


You have to find a place for uploaded files that can be accessed from all servers. There are several approaches to this.


A dedicated server
A database
Distribute the files across the servers and have an algorithm for determining which server owns which files.



Is there a limit as to how many linodes I can buy and 'attach' to the node balancer and does each need an additional private IP address?


I'm not familiar with linode specifically, but generally tens of servers can be connected to each load balancer. Each server would need its own IP address. This could be a private IP address on a local network with network address translation, or it could be a public IP address.


How about pushing new code changes to the website? How would I deal with this if all source files were on different servers?


Each server will need to get a copy of the changes. It is common to use rsync or a source control system such as git for this purpose.


How about SSL? would my current certificate continue to work across all servers?


You will be able to use your existing certificate but specific implementation depends on the load balancer. There are two common senarios:


The certificate is installed on the load balancer. The load balancer handles the encryption and talks to the servers in plain text.
The certificate is installed on each server and the load balancer sends encrypted requests between them.

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