Should I use two different web servers for my company blog/website and web application?

I am running a RoR web app, hosted on a VPS. The content part of my site (homepage, features, about, contact, wordpress blog etc.) is also hosted on the same VPS. Both are served by Apache.

I have some hand coded html files for the content and maintaining them is a huge time sink. So I'm considering moving it all into the wordpress blog.

My question is - does it make sense to move the wordpress blog to a different provider, say mediatemple, so that I don't have to deal with the maintenance of that (apache config etc)? I can continue to have my RoR web app on the VPS running on a subdomain.

How do you guys usually manage your web applications and content?

From serverfault

• I'd say you need to measure your traffic, RAM usage, CPU usage, and disk usage to see if you need another server. If all sites are pretty low traffic, there may be no reason to use another server. Of course there may also be technical reasons why two technologies cannot co-exist on the same server.

  From sims

• If you're using wordpress, I'd suggest moving it to a separate server. The advantages are two fold

  1) You don't have to worry about scaling wordpress, let someone else take care of it. If your blog traffic spikes, wordpress can get very hungry, taking resources away from your app.

  2) Redundancy. If you have problems with your web-application server, you can give information through your blog about the issue and how long you expect to be un-available for.

  Just my two-cents.

  Andrew

  From Andrew Taylor