Keep the client experience easy - single server contact point
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-03-27 23:44:47 - Graham Ellis
Your company will have one or two web servers ... and you'll be visited by one or two million different clients. So it makes logical sense for all the complicated stuff to go on your one or two machines, and leave your clients with just a simple browser. Have you even got on the phone ... to a utility, or travel company, or government office, or insurer or bank ... and found that you're referred on from one person to the next, to another and then to a fourth - who puts you on hold or tells you to call in again on another number? I have, and it makes sense - if you possibly can - when you're providing a service to provide a single point of contact. Not only to improve the experience of your customer, but also to make efficient use of you own resources.
Putting these thoughts together, it's logical to have a single web server program - such as Apache httpd - running on a server computer as the single point of contact for your organisation or web application. Then have that server, "silently" as far as the visitor is concerned - run scripts in Perl or PHP, which it turn refer on to databases using MySQL or some other technology - (Apache + Mysql + Perl / PHP = AMP). And then - with all this open source - what better operating system to oversee the whole than Linux, and you have your LAMP application.
There is a lot to deploying LAMP - but far better that than having to configure lots of machines and services or make life complex for your users. And you can learn just how the elements on the diagram that I've used to illustrate this article go together on our deploying LAMP training course