New Setup Question

matthew01

I am new to enhance and wanting to setup a new hosting environment, want to start out small but can grow as I get more clients and bigger

I was looking at putting control panel, application database on a single server
And then DNS Role on two server

Or should I put the control panel role as 1 server, Application, Database on another server and the DNS Role on another server and backup on another server.

I don't intend on offering email hosting, but do I need the email role for smtp so website contact forms work

Look forward to what people recommend

My concern is having the Control Panel role on one server if the control panel server was to die or break then the rest of the environment would likely break

I was hoping to have an environment setup like cPanel where all roles on one server and then if I was to need a second server setup would I need to buy another license to have control panel, application, database,
And backup role on separate server

matthew01

And if I could have all roles other then DNS and backup on a single Sever

Can I have 2x Servers with all Roles like Control Panel, Application, Database and Email to use the same 2x DNS Servers instead of creating new DNS Server each time I want to build new server

rdbf

It's all down to preference.

How many servers do you want to get, how much do you want to spend on them, which server providers do you want to use, which restrictions does that provider have (very important for SMTP), how do you want to set the servers up

Some things to keep in mind:

If the controlpanel dies, there's no way to get it back without significant work. The more you put on there, the bigger the issues will be if that happens
The DNS roles are very light, you can consider not getting separate servers for them
The backup role is very different from the rest and is probably best on a separate server from all the others
Application and Database on the same server is very sensible, unless you're doing very serious things
You can only have 1 controlpanel, but you can have as many of the rest of the roles as you want. Although 2x DNS and 1x backup is usually enough to begin with
Check the different design philosophies between cPanel and Enhance, it's a massive difference. The Enhance way has clear benefits but lacks many things that "just work" with cPanel etc.

nhybgtvfr

i always try to put as little as possible on the server running the control panel.
it's just personal preference, but it just makes it so much easier to deal with if something does go wrong.
plus you don't want anything else slowing down the control panel when your trying to make critical changes.

at least if you're hosting wordpress sites, always put the application and db roles on the same server.
i've tried keeping them on separate servers before, but even with powerful servers and a high speed, low latency network between them, the difference in speed when serving the website was very noticeable.

if you're hosting dns yourself, always have one dns server in a different, geographically distant datacentre. definitely
don't want to risk all your dns servers being unavailable at the same time.

backup role, also ideally, geographically separated from the websites, and with at least one replication with another datacentre provider. if the backup is on the same server the website is on, it's not really a backup.
same if it's all with the same hosting/datacentre provider.. if they suddenly shutdown, decide to close your account without warning, etc, then you can't access your backup to rebuild elsewhere.