Setup highly available/redundant (multi-server) dynamic one-site hosting with whole server backups?

[hetzvirtualmin]

Hello, I need your precious advice on how to proceed with a dynamic website (PHP8+MySQL5.7+Redis+supervisor, rsync) hosting as a newbie in webservers management.

Virtualmin - Webmin
I am assuming that my control panel of choice would be Virtualmin (which is said by 3rd parties to be a module of a Webmin) and inside Virtualmin I will still have some general server monitoring functions like it is in Webmin (per the screenshots - i am not user of it) since Webmin is installed along with a Virtualmin (per this comment).

High availability (load balancing) or failover for a single site:
After setting up the webserver and hosting a dynamic PHP+MySQL site, some time passed, I see that i need load balancing or want more redundancy (fail-over to a secondary server) can i setup this via Virtualmin GUI or can you link me to a CLI tutorial? And is it really handy to setup this high availability (multi-server setup) right at the beginning instead of after one year of a single server hosting?

Backups:
In case I will end up on a single server setup, then i would want to backup all the data on the server (i mean ideally all data on drive) from time to time so it can be easily recovered with a different server provider and then backup the website data more frequently off the server. Is this possible via GUI? How? Or do you suggest any third party tutorial?

If you are not willing to link to article/tutorial, please kindly mention exact feature names so i can try to find the tutorial online.

I have already read High Availabilty, Virtualmin with Multiple Servers - #4 by Joe (not layman detailed, no GUI setup)

[stefan1959]

@hetzvirtualmin

MySQL5.7

Well virtualmin installs MariaDB version 10

[jimr1]

@hetzvirtualmin

MySQL5.7

That’s a bit old maybe, if your going to use mysql, use a later version if I remember correctly that is version 8.x

[hetzvirtualmin]

@stefan1959

@hetzvirtualmin

MySQL5.7

Well virtualmin installs MariaDB version 10

There are some steps on how to replace MariaDB by MySQL:

Need procedure for installing MySQL instead of MariaDB

To save head-scratching and hair-pulling of anyone intending to do this, here’s how it goes: According to MySQL :: MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual :: 2.10.4 Securing the Initial MySQL Account : Installation using RPM packages generates an initial random password, which is written to the server error log. But no, that’s not correct. In the log the password is not output, and instead there are messages that encourage to run a command to change the root password, which does not run, of course, becaus…

Though such replacement may cause issues as mentioned on same page under later post:

Need procedure for installing MySQL instead of MariaDB

Here’s an update for anyone who decides to go down this rocky route: Numerous tests and attempts were made. I’m not a total noob when it comes to Linux, webmin, and Virtualmin, but it really took plenty of effort to get to the conclusions: +----------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | OS | MySQL | Comment | +----------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | CentOS 8 | Ver …

Another replacement steps:

MySQL DB not compatible with Maria DB

A Virtualmin backup only backs up databases by performing a mysqldump. That is the only way to safely backup a database…the binary files are not guaranteed to work from one version to another, and definitely won’t work going from MySQL to Mariadb. If a restore fails because of the database, you’ll either need to munge the data manually or stick with MySQL. We’re not experts on migrations from MySQL to MariaDB. Mostly, it Just Works, as the two are very nearly compatible. But, they have begun t…

Virtualmin installation with MySql, not MariaDB

You cannot. We cannot and will not support old installations of Virtualmin (and repos for old installer versions are periodically deleted to prevent people from using old unsupported versions). (And, how the hell did you interpret my comment there as being a suggestion to install an old version of Virtualmin?) Switching to MySQL is covered in several other posts in our forums (be careful about who you take advice from, as well…if it isn’t me or other staff, maybe keep reading for follow ups fr…

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/post/how-to-migrate-from-mariadb-to-mysql-80 <<<<

It is worrisome for a layman needing to manually switch from MDB to MSQ. I am already having established site with populated database 10.6.18-MariaDB-cll-lve . My script provider is using MySQL, but told me i may stay on a MariaDB. So that may not be a big problem.

Can anyone please address the main questions in the 1st post of this thread regarding clustering/high availability? I would like to stay away from a load balancing setup with single load balancer (a signle point of a failure) and I think I would need a tutorial. Thank you in advance.