Zillo's questions

I run a site which has high traffic surges and because of that auto scaling solutions is very profitable for this case. Currently the web server is able to horizontally auto scale but the bottleneck is on the MySQL server.

• I have tried with Amazon RDS Multi-AZ but it takes like 15 minutes for the 12 GB database to upgrade with some minutes of downtime. It has helped a lot when I already knew that a traffic surge was going to happen in some specific moment.
• I have also considered Xeround. This is probably the best solution although it is quite expensive for databases of this size. Anyway it is not an option because I legally need the database to be in the European Union.
• I have read about Scalr but not sure if that could be helpful and how.
• I have seen that many cloud hosting providers offer vertical scaling solutions which I think it has 0 downtime (not sure if that is really possible, as far as I know they use Xen hypervisor). That could be a solution but I wonder if it has not downtime and how the MySQL config (and many other things on the OS) are able to upgrade also without downtime.
• I have tried with MySQL slave servers but it was not helpful at all.
• I am using memcache which helps a lot but it is not enough. I need to upgrade because of writes, not just because of reads.

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance

We are going to return a few rented CentOS dedicated servers and I was wondering about any way to remove sensitive content (a few folders) from the HDD before returning these servers?

Maybe some Linux alternative to "Eraser"? If so, what are those alternatives?

Thank you in advance

I am using Squid 2.6 as a reverse proxy. I am receiving all the traffic from several domain names (.com .org etc.) but the website is always the same. I would like to have only one domain (specially for SEO reasons) so I would like Squid to redirect those domains with a 301 Moved Permanently HTTP header to the main one. Note that I also want to redirect internal pages. What is the best way (taking into consideration performance and speed) to do so? Squirm?

I am managing all my instances with the AWS Management Console (the GUI web console) but now I want to use Auto Scale and it seems that this can not be done with that console. Yes, there is CloudWatch but I can only create alarms (e-mail notifications), it seems that CouldWatch needs you to add the auto scale policy in some other place (by command line console?). I would like to use some easy GUI interface. Ylastic and Scalr seems to be a good option. Which one do you think is better?

Regarding Scalr, is there any difference between the open source software Scalr and the service Scalr.net? I mean, is the GUI interface the same? I like the idea of the Scalr because I do not need to give my Secret Access Key to a third party (like in Ylastic or in Scalr.net)

One question about the Scalr software, it has to be installed in the instances or it must be installed in another machine? Do I need to setup again all my security permissions, AMIs, snapshots, etc. or I can use AWS Management Console for everything and Scalr just to auto scale.

I wonder how generally work the IP addresses on dedicated servers providers? The IP addresses are generally rented so you have no option to keep the IP's if you move to another provider? I see that many of those companies allow you to change some information in the IP WHOIS databases but that doesn't mean that you own the IP?