Introducing the Modwest Grid

Google found many years ago that it makes a lot of sense to deploy massive computational power not with huge expensive "enterprise" servers, but by using thousands and thousands of commodity machines. So, when any one server fails, the impact on user experience is generally non-existent. And Google can obviously handle massive amounts of traffic.

While nowhere near Google’s scale, we’ve pursued a similar strategy with the Modwest http://www.modwest.com
hosting system. We have a large group of servers responsible for serving the web pages of thousands of our customer sites, we have a separate group of servers responsible for handling their mail services, and multiple MySQL servers that do nothing but database queries for these websites.

We call this "group of groups" the Modwest Grid.

Full Story: http://blog.modwest.com/2010/08/introducing-the-modwest-grid.html