I sat down this afternoon and put together a diagram of my hosting company. I manage 29 servers– mostly mine, but some for clients– and at times it’s hard to remember what goes where. Does everything have a hot failover ready to jump in if a server goes down? Am I backing up files correctly so I always have multiple copies of everything? Are the services balanced so my clients get the best performance?
Since the servers I own are all named for atomic elements (props to Thom) I figured the diagram should look sort of periodic-table-like. Yes, that makes me even geekier: combining system administration with chemistry.
The good news (well, sort of) is that I found a few things that could be beefed up a bit. So that’ll require a few upgrades over the coming days and weeks. It’s funny that when I tell some of my clients that in addition to doing web programming I can also host everything for them, their first question is “are you running these web sites in your basement or something?” No, not quite. I pay more per month for co-location than I do for my house.