High-performance database clusters

The most valuable data of Drupal and WordPress websites — their setup and content — is managed by a database. That’s why the database system is the most critical hosting service for both your website’s performance and its availability. We’ve built the database system of our managed hosting platform with these two aspects in mind.

Performance

We see our MySQL databases perform 20,000 queries per second. How did we achieve this?

First, we run our MySQL servers on bare metal servers, i.e. physical hardware. This gives us full control over all system resources. In this case, the two resources that influence website performance the most are disk storage and memory (RAM). On freistilbox, MySQL runs on SSD-based storage (Solid State Disks) which guarantees maximum data throughput and low latency. SSD write performance in particular is superior over spinning disks by multiple orders of magnitude. We’ve also configured the InnoDB storage engine of our database servers for optimum RAM usage. By providing ample memory to MySQL, we enable the database to use caches for storing and reusing metadata and query results.

Availability

Drupal and WordPress websites can’t work without a database. That’s why we’ve engineered our database service to exceed an uptime of 99.99%. If hardware failure, software upgrades and other maintenance must not impact your website’s reliability, the only proper solution is redundancy. On our managed hosting platform, database service is always provided by a MySQL cluster — not by a single MySQL server like with most conventional hosting providers. Within these MySQL clusters, all write transactions are immediately replicated from the active server to at least one standby server. Since the follower servers always have an identical data set, we can switch service operation to one of them immediately when the active node fails or before it has to be taken down for maintenance.

A side benefit of this database architecture is that running backups on the standby nodes is an elegant solution for making consistent copies of large data sets without impacting your website’s operation in any way.