Running a mission-critical website on a single web server creates a significant risk, as routine maintenance or unexpected hardware failures can take your service offline instantly. This tutorial guides you through transforming a standalone web server into a resilient High Availability (HA) cluster using accessible open-source tools.
We will utilize Proxmox to clone your existing environment and deploy OPNsense with HAProxy to intelligently distribute traffic between multiple nodes. To handle dynamic content, we solve the challenge of file synchronization by implementing Syncthing, a decentralized peer-to-peer tool that keeps folders like WordPress uploads identical across servers in real-time.
You will learn how to configure Syncthing on headless Linux instances, tunnel securely to its GUI for management, and set up automated health monitoring using Uptime Kuma. By the end, you will have a robust architecture that can survive individual server reboots without downtime, offering a simpler alternative to complex enterprise distributed file systems.
