I’m about to scale UP our sql2008 database. Simple. But I might need to scale OUT our sql databases. For a simple scale out situation (ie distributing the processing load), are there some good initial best practices? i know there’s so many solutions which will be product specific -> many writes & not many reads, many read & not many write, a bit of both, etc. etc.. But for a site that’s pretty read heavy [...]

We are running rather large LAMP sites which scale well software wise. We use redundant load balancers in front of a bunch of webservers using MySQL via a proxy in master-slave-slave-slave. We are using a very large US provider. They are not very cheap but not the most expensive either. Last week there was a very large DDOS on their network and our cluster was affected; we lost network for a bit resulting in downtime. [...]