Originally Posted by borked

well, technically I think you can run two instances of mysql on different ports, but by far the simplest is to run the slave on your backup server or a cheap dedi or even cloud setup. I run mine on a 256MB cloud instance that costs me 1c/hr and have no problems on it. Then that gets backed up to my remote 100GB backup space. Mysql (my most valuable data) is then spread across 3 servers... Backup of sites/configs is spread across 2 servers.

Another option would be to take a cheap 250GB dedi box at ?15/month, run the mysql slave there and use that too for backups, that way everything is spread across 3 drives, but I like the cloud availability (100%) for a replication server...