Server move

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sinbad
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Server move

Post by sinbad »

We'll shortly be moving all our web services to a new virtual dedicated server - this is to give us more control over the site. We've considered doing it for a while, but the recent forum hack brought it to the fore again. I want to thank everyone who has donated to the project already, it means that the costs of the initial set up and first couple of months are already covered, which is a help.

The switchover will require setting the forums on this site to read-only during the transfer of DNS - it will be obvious when this happens. The new site will have forums set up ready to go so as soon as DNS catches up you can start posting again.
Last edited by sinbad on Fri Apr 15, 2005 11:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by sinbad »

FORUM IS BEING LOCKED NOW FOR THE SERVER MOVE

Apologies for the delay, forums will be up on the new site imminently.
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Post by sinbad »

As you can tell, the move is done. The server has already come under enormous load which required temas and _mental_ to do a whole bunch of backflips to accommodate, but (touch wood) we appear to be managing now.
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It's happening again!!

Post by sinbad »

Yes, we're moving the server again very soon. Sorry about that, but with ogre3d.org's bandwidth being at least 3 times what we expected (and that's with no downloads or CVS traffic, just web), we have no choice but to move to another completely different provider. Our new setup allows us up to 1000Gb/mo, which we hope should be enough this time ;)

The same drill will apply - forums will be locked for the period of the DNS transfer, and we'll try to manually catch up with any Wiki updates during the transfer time.
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Post by Clay »

Consider having your DNS record's time-to-live set to 5 minutes. You can ask your current service provider, or whomever is in charge of your dns, to do this. Once this change propagates across DNS servers then DNS switching will occur almost instantly (well, after 5 minutes), which should minimize downtime. Once you change the TTL, you have 7 days to move the server (but it takes 24hrs to propogate the TTL change after you do it). After 7 days all DNS servers will automatically switch the TTL back to the standard 24hrs.

I work for a large hosting company, and when we have to move our client's sites to different servers this is what we do. No one has complained yet.
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Post by _mental_ »

The team has already discussed lowering the TTL but unfortunately this doesn't appear to be an option with the current DNS host.
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Post by Clay »

Ah that is unfortunent. =/
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Post by bana »

Really makes you appreciate how much Sourceforge gives away for free :shock:

I'm glad that the donations will hold for a while though.
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Re: It's happening again!!

Post by RoundSparrow »

sinbad wrote:Our new setup allows us up to 1000Gb/mo, which we hope should be enough this time ;)
Some general comments... as whenever I see someone talking about "GB/month" - I want to point out that medium and high-end co-location and hosting often does not really meter things this way :)

"1000GB/month" is another way of generally saying 3Mbps connection connection on 95th percentile scheme. At least that is the number I've seen most people toss around to equate the two schemes. You can run into differences if you find that your traffic is not spread throughout the day/week/month... and also if your site doesn't have equal upload/download amounts (best to make sure comparing apples to apples when tossing around figures).

At these kind of bandwidth rates and above, especially with a forum that supports searches... you are typically getting into a dedicated machine of one form or another.

Hosting is the USA, you would pay anywhere from $150 to $400 a month for a single server with 5Mbps... you can get better deals with longer term contracts, etc. If you are paying more than $200 now for your 1000GB/month... you should delve into the issue more.

Pay close attention to the rate of going over your bandwidth... there are a LOT of small providers out there trying to get as many customers as they can and ditch the ones that actually use their sites :)

The best place to learn about rates and varous ways to get servers... www.webhostingtalk.com
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Post by sinbad »

This is a dedicated server (current one is a virtual dedicated server but the max bandwidth we can get on this provider is 100Gb/mo, which isn't enough), and it's pretty reasonable.

We were looking at http://www.servermatrix.com originally due to good references and a decent bandwidth, we actually went for http://www.layeredtech.com in the end which offers slightly lower hardware (but nevertheless more than we're operating on now) for a very reasonable price - thanks to qsilver for the recommendation.

At this stage co-location wasn't really an option due to the logistics, and a dedicated server from the provider is more convenient in any case.
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Post by RoundSparrow »

sinbad... I realized my figures might not match yours.

Are you sure you are saying this site is giving you 100GB/month or 1000Gb/month (Byte/bit).

I agree that dedicated makes sense for you... I only recommend co-location if you have groups of servers + your own firewall. Or if you need lots of RAM (if you want 4GB+ of RAM in a server, typically much cheaper to go co-location).. Or in my case we want identical equipment at multiple places for disaster recovery / remote support reasons... and we have some database servers that need 8GB+ of RAM.

LayeredTech uses ThePlanet in Dallas... I think the same as ServerMatrix, but I haven't been to ThePlanet site in over 12 months... Nice place :)
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sinbad
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Post by sinbad »

Yeah, sorry - I'm talking GB (byte) in all cases. Scary really- it's mainly caused by people gawking at the screenshots, but who can blame them? :)
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Post by temas »

Yeah it's all at ThePlanet.
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Post by joshcryer »

I am hosting my up and coming site on http://www.serverbeach.com ... seems like a freakin' good deal... 2000GB for $99.
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Post by temas »

We've already purchased the server agreement, but thanks for the continued suggestions everyone. We'll be moving shortly.
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Post by sinbad »

FORUM IS BEING LOCKED (AGAIN) NOW FOR THE SERVER MOVE

Apologies for the delay, forums will be up on the new site imminently.
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Post by temas »

In case it wasn't obvious, we're on the new server now. If you have any issues with the site please let me know.
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