etymxris
INTL Developer
JUST AS PLANNED
Ballkicks: (+179 / -16)
Posts: 942 (0.157)
Reg. Date: Jun 2004
Location: Virginia
Gender: Male |
(Originally posted on: 02-05-07 09:22:37 AM)
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The old server broke. It's probably the motherboard, but we're not sure at this point. Anyway, the host is going to look at the old server today and ship it back to me if it can't easily be fixed. Only when I can get the data from the old server will all the old threads be available again.
However, anything posted here will not be lost. So don't feel skittish about posting new threads.
Lessons learned:
1) Relying on a single colocated machine is not acceptable. When hardware or software fails the site experiences extended downtimes.
2) The current hardware needs to be replaced, and the current colocation company has unacceptably slow support.
3) Shared hosting is pretty slow, even with SQL optimizations I performed yesterday. It also has numerous downtimes, two half-hour downtimes since I set it up yesterday, but these are usually resolved within a few hours.
INTL is currently running on shared hosting. No matter how I optimize the site, resource restrictions are going to make page load times anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds. I think, though I have no evidence to prove this, that users are more likely to stick around with faster load times. I think the smooth operation of the site during the past month before it exploded again contributed to the small influx of new users. So fast load times, in my opinion, contribute to both a better browsing experience and healthier forum activity.
The only way that I can see to get back to sub-second load times is with a dedicated or colocated server. However, dedicated servers are more expensive to host and have all the same weaknesses that colocated servers have.
The best option, I think, is to have two blade servers hosted on Colo-Pronto. That would be $40/mo, which is cheaper than the $50/mo I'm paying now for one server. However, I would have to put together some blade servers, which are usually pretty expensive. One blade could be an old PIII off ebay, which would probably be about $300. But the main server should be about as beefy as the old server. Luckily, most of the old server is probably still functional. If that's so, then I just need a barebones 1U dual opteron blade, such as this one. That would be about $400 once 1U heatsinks are thrown in.
We could try to use shared hosting as a backup, but the lack of root access on these accounts makes live, synchronous backups difficult. So any downtime would likely be for at least a few hours why DNS propagates. In addition, some posts and other data would be lost during the failover.
If both machines were at the same colocation facility, there would be various ways to make failover much faster. Backup could also be synchronous.
In any case, these are the two options for improvement:
1) 1 colocation machine ($20/mo) ($70 setup), with new server ($400), using shared hosting as backup.
2) 2 colocation machines ($40/mo) $70 setup, with one beefy server ($400), and one backup server ($300).
Of course we could stick with things as they are. If you don't think INTL is worth donating money to, it'll just stay as it is for the moment. Whenever we can scrounge up enough money to improve it, however, we will. That may not happen for quite some time without donations.
Anyone who donates would of course be able to use the new server to host any legal content that was not terribly bandwidth intensive (bandwidth intensive = more than 50GB/mo or so).
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