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List:       info-cyrus
Subject:    Re: [POLL] virtual domains and Murder
From:       Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe () paniq ! net>
Date:       2002-07-27 19:58:31
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On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 05:12, Joe Rhett wrote:
> > If all of your customers are large enough to require their own murder, I'm
> > impressed ;)  For most clients, you could virtual host them on a single
> > server and be done with it.  However, if one of your customer spans two
> > servers, they're likely large enough to be given special consideration
> > anyway (at that point you're talking about several thousand users from a
> > single customer, when I worked at a top-20 web hosting company in at the
> > end of the 90s, the largest clients were on the order of 20-30 users).
>  
> I think he's trying to say (and I'm trying to say) the the I/HSP's goal is
> to not have to concern oneself with which server any given user gets put
> on.  For example, I have 3 servers with 50 clients with 20 mailboxes each.
> If one day every single one of those clients hires 10 new people, I want to
> build a new server and put those 500 new users on it. With no thought to
> where the other users for the same virtual domain exist.  That's a 1-day
> job.  Rearranging the servers so that users from the same virtual domain
> host on the same server would be a major project, and the users would not
> understand the wait.

Yes, this was a major part of what I was trying to get across. As Rob
said, most customers will have a small number of mailboxes, perhaps an
average of 3-5. Adding a mailbox has to be done in a matter of minutes.
You want to take the servers you have and put all the mailboxes on them.
If a customer happens to have enough mailboxes to span more than an
entire server, they won't understand why you want to charge an extra fee
for building and maintaining a separate system for them. It does cost
money and you have to get that from somewhere. Rather than that, you
want to build and maintain one system and enlarge it when needed.

There's also another aspect which I think is worth remembering: most
ISPs/HSPs are more likely to invest in a large number of small servers
rather than a small number of large servers. Thus, the number of
mailboxes per server may not always be very high.

Just one note before the thread wanders off from the subject: I'm not
saying Murder is the only choice, or the right choice. I'm just saying
it would be very nice if it were. And I think it has a good chance of
being a good choice for this particular scenario.

Cheers,
Fabian Fagerholm


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