Installing Plesk Sitebuilder in Distributed Environment

Most Plesk Sitebuilder installations include a single Plesk Sitebuilder server and one or several servers allocated for hosting published users' sites. However, if you plan to service more than 1000 sites, the resources of a single Plesk Sitebuilder server may not be enough for handling the associated workload. In this case, we recommend that you deploy Plesk Sitebuilder in a distributed architecture.

There are three types of resource-consuming processes in Plesk Sitebuilder:

• Web requests processing (CPU/RAM intensive) - that is, processing users' activities performed in the Plesk Sitebuilder interface.
• Database storage (Disk/RAM intensive) - that is, storing the Plesk Sitebuilder database, including the databases which Plesk Sitebuilder creates for each dynamic site to store the modules data.
• File storage (Disk intensive) - that is, storing users' site work directories containing other sites data, apart from modules (site pages with content, images, uploaded media files, and so on). These data are necessary for generating the site previews when users are editing their sites in the Wizard.

You can allocate a separate hardware appliance, or a number of appliances for handling each of these tasks. By configuring these components to work together and share the same resources, you can build a Plesk Sitebuilder Data center allowing to process the data of 20000 and more sites. Below are the examples of distributed architecture solutions suitable for handling various amounts of estimated workload.

Handling 1000 - 5000 sites. Two-tier deployment

In this architecture, the resources are allocated as follows:

Plesk Sitebuilder server (deployed on two physical servers)

• A Plesk Sitebuilder Web server which handles all users' queries and stores users' sites work directories.
• A dedicated Database server hosting the Plesk Sitebuilder database.

Plesk Sitebuilder publishing space

A number of publishing servers used for hosting published users' sites.

Handling 5000 sites and more. Clustered deployment

This type of architecture solution is the most flexible and scalable one. The resources are allocated as follows:

Plesk Sitebuilder Cluster

The cluster involves two physical tiers:

• Application Tier

  On this tier, several Plesk Sitebuilder Web servers are deployed, forming a Plesk Sitebuilder web farm. Each Plesk Sitebuilder server is accessed separately via the Plesk Sitebuilder interface. You have an option of setting up centralized login between these servers by means of Single Sign On (SSO) technology as described in section Deploying Web Servers.

  If necessary, you can configure a load balancer (a network switch or software application) to distribute users' requests between the Web servers.

• Data Tier

  On the Data tier, the following hardware appliances are deployed:

  • A dedicated Database server (or, in case of large workload, a Database cluster).
  • A dedicated File Storage server (or a number of dedicated File Storage servers), which stores users' site work directories.

  These data tier components can be shared between all Plesk Sitebuilder servers deployed on the Application tier.

Plesk Sitebuilder publishing space

A number of publishing servers used for hosting published users' sites.

Hardware configuration and topology recommendations based on the estimated workload

Below you will find an outline of recommended hardware configuration and topology for the distributed Plesk Sitebuilder installation, based on the number of sites to be processed*.

At any moment each type of a distributed solution can be scaled further at any structural point, to accommodate the increased number of sites and users.

*In order to simplify the calculations, we use the number of sites as a criterion of estimating the workload. Of course, this does not mean that a certain fixed number of sites imposes the same requirements on any installation. The estimations provided in this document should be considered generic and broadly approximate.