Usually a Joomla website runs of a VPS that shares hundreds or sometimes even thousands of websites. But what to do if you run a high traffic website that has high uptime demands? Of course you can purchase a dedicated server, with backups and spare parts available on site, but what if that’s not enough?

For those situations it’s good to know that with no tweaking at all to the Joomla core it is possible to create a setup like this. For security reasons I can not reveal the live site, but I can assure you, it runs like a dream and it never brakes down (knocking on wood).

The site runs two load balancers which are cross linked. Two webservers and two MySQL servers are running behind the load balancers and are also cross linked. The first set consisting of a load balancer, webserver and MySQL server runs in one data center while the other one runs in a data center in a different location.

The beauty of the setup is that an entire data center can fail! Or imagine that a webserver in datacenter one fails and the load balancer in data center two. Still no worries. When the repairs are done, there is no need for manual (re)synchronization on the MySQL servers. The backend of Joomla has stayed in tact and is also synchronizing files amongst the webservers.

Credits go out to XLS Hosting who have helped setting this up.