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A good pair of boxes to host WHMCS
iskandarreza
Member
I'm paranoid by nature. Doc says I have a bit of an anxiety disorder. They give me Clonazepam which is wonderful, it's like the locally illicit drug Nimetazepam a.k.a. Happy 5 but on steroids and without the impurities.
Wait sorry I want to talk about something else. WHMCS, yes. I am somewhat paranoid and I want to set up WHMCS and a mirror on 2 boxes. So my question is what does this entail and where can I get 2 [VPSs] that can run WHMCS from two different providers on two different datacenters in two different locations that can service Asia acceptably fast? Oh they also have to be really affordable and I want to pay on an annual basis so I don't have to worry about that.
--Izzy
Edit: I meant VPS, not VPN. I can make the VPN with a good VPS.
Comments
VPN's ? Also do you have your own WHMCS License?
@Francisco
Could run active+active MySQL/MariaDB, normal PHP5-FPM, Nginx as webserver and put all that behind a "managed" anycast setup by BuyVM (NJ, Las Vegas, LU) - Not perfect for Asia (due to NJ, but usually not much traffic should arrive there from Asian ISPs) but reasonably good. Anycast enables rather simple failover and should cause only downtime in the few minutes range, you will loose PHP sessions though but no idea what implication that has on WHMCS.
Don't take that for longer term, a month max if you take it daily, benzos are extremely addictive and withdrawal is horrible.
The WHMCS license will not work on two boxes / two IPs. I doubt you want to pay for two licenses. Don't overdo it, a single WHMCS at some reliable place should suffice. Just take regular database backups.
Just use 1 WHMCS
@William Once I took 25 mg of Clonozepam in one instance !
I intend to use just one license. The mirror doesn't need an active license unless something happens to the main box in which case I just reissue the license to the mirror IP.
I already have regular backups. But if something happens to my WHMCS instance it would take me some time to restore it. If something happens to the server its on then even more time will pass before it's restored.
Nope, I don't think I'm overdoing it. You gotta have backups AND backups of your backup.
If you have to go through the manual process of reissuing the license then the second server isn't going to be live failover. You would still need to update the DNS to point to the correct IP and then issue the license to the second box and that's after you're waken up in the middle of the night because your primary is down.
It's probably best to focus your efforts to keep the primary up. Take backups find a reliable provider, get some ddos protection and call it a day. Really all you can do is hope and pray someone isn't a jerk and attacks it.
Once you got all the license info squared up, I would go with a MariaDB with Galera replication for a easy setup/config. However, personally I would be more concerned about the security of WHMCS over a host/hardware failure, with either case a backup would be ideal
If you are gonna manually reissue the license to the second IP and wait for the dns update, why can't you just rsync (+ cron at 5/10 mins) all the files to the second server and serve from there when the first server dies?
That's CRAZY.
MySQL replication to the backup box then promote it if you need
I guess you could get the 2nd IP authorized with WHMCS. I saw a thread either here or on WHT where someone claimed they did it for him.
You can mirror the database but that's a big PiTA which is why almost nobody does it.
IMO, don't unnecessarily overdo it.
Run WHMCS on a decent box, but ensure that you have a real time off-site data and DB duplication setup in place (rsync for files, and master-slave MySQL or MariaDB Galera cluster, for DB).
In case the primary web-server goes offline, you can simply re-issue the WHMCS license for the new IP, and pick up right where you left off.
The downtime would be further reduced if you use Cloudflare to manage your domain. So, even if you have to change the IP for the A record that your WHMCS installation is set up at, their anycast network will ensure that the DNS propagation would be FAST!
But, I did not die :P
You got lucky and probably had a lot of tolerance. It's a dosage within the suicidal range...
Up to you but that is kind of overdoing it as well imho. You can set up WHMCS to email and FTP a backup of the database everyday when the main daily cron runs that does all the other daily things. That is probably good enough for most people. It would be a very very rare situation where you ever need that backup. You would have records of everything else that may have happened that day elsewhere. Emails and payment processor transaction logs.
I can't function without CloudFlare anymore. It's too good to not use.
Hey isn't there an API for WHMCS to reissue the license? Can set up an if this then that or Zapier function to automate the failover because I know CloudFlare has an API function to change IP address.