Worth being honest about this one rather than quietly editing history: earlier planning treated “multi-server” as generic web-hosting-node clustering — accounts distributed across an interchangeable pool of machines. That’s not the shape a real hosting stack needs.
The right model is a self-contained full stack on one box — web, mail, database, and DNS all together. The one genuinely useful cross-server relationship is DNS clustering: a main server can push its DNS out to dedicated DNS-only servers. No fleet of interchangeable web nodes.
Corrected the model to match:
- Main server — the full stack. Every account and site lives here. This is what the dev box already is.
- DNS-only server — a stripped-down install of the same software, with DNS secondary functions only, syncing from the Main server.
The knock-on effect: the core provisioning milestone (create an account, get a real site) turns out not to need a remote component at all — it’s local execution on the Main server. A dev VM that had already been stood up for the wrong reason got renamed and repurposed rather than wasted.
Not the most exciting entry, but getting the foundation right before more gets built on it matters more than looking tidy.