Designing a (supposed to be) LARGE website

[xeronix]

Hey guys, I've got some problems that I just can't figure out on my own about how to structure my website.

 

#1:

 

I do know that I'm planning on keeping all of the script's files on one server, then simply mounting that server on my Apache servers, hence letting me load balance between servers of the same script.

 

However, I'm having a little trouble as to if I should with subdomains or just working with the domain/login.php type structure.

 

I personally think that working with subdomains is cleaner, but that sort of messes up my concept of working with one library of code.

 

I'm trying to have 1 configuration file serve my information, but if I were to use subdomains, I would need multiple config files (at least I haven't thought of a way around it).

 

I did think about having the system mount the root of my script, for example, /site then simply storing different sectors such as /site/login in each respective folder, then simply calling /site/config into the script via fopen or some other script to keep my config file universal.

 

#2:

 

I'm thinking about using load balancing with Apache and MySQL servers, however, how will I be able to keep my user's login sessions valid?

 

It seems that if the Load Balancer were to switch servers while the user's session were still valid it would invalidate the cookie.

 

That's when I thought of using cloud computing to run the entire site, however there are faults to that as I don't have a big initial investment to be putting into servers and colocation.

 

 

If you have any ideas which you think would help me please post.

 

Thanks!

[shlumph]

You may want to look into persistent sessions, namely storing the session data in the DB.

[xeronix]

Alright, now that I'm reading into persistant sessions, do you think I should keep my sessions in a completely separate LB/MDB/SDB array? I suppose it would give added security, but at a greater cost.