How do i get two apache servers to power 1 website

Question

I'm very new to servers and such and i'm just wondering how i set up 2 servers on the same local network to power apache? So there both handling the traffic to the same website?

Answer 1

Two main options:

Split the work load so they're doing different things. This gets you more processing power but no redundancy. You can control what goes where by domain name.

Use a load balancer on a third system to pass the work to the two processing systems. The advantage here is one server can take over all the work if one goes down. It also allows you to shift the load to one in order to do upgrades. The apache mod_proxy can do a poor man's load balancer while dedicated (and generally expensive) load balancing network hardware is a more reliable and scalable solution.

Edit: It looks like it's actually mod_proxy_balancer that does it. Here's a link to the docs:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html