• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

2020-06-03 Site Moved to New Hardware

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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Hello everyone,

Welcome to the newly refreshed 68kMLA! It’s the same as the old one, but we moved the site to some new hardware!

My apologies for both the recent extended outage and the lack of any forewarning that this was going to happen. wthww and I have been workshopping this move for a little while, and, for me at least, some stress related to work and the real world got in the way of the communication between us about it.

With that in mind, and with the less than completely perfect introduction to the move, I wanted briefly to talk about what we (wthww did all the actual work) did and why.

We were due for a regularly scheduled outage for a software update and snapshot, which itself would probably have gone faster, but we also made the decision to re-locate the site to some new hosting, which turned out to take longer than we thought it would, for a couple technical reasons.

First, why a new host?

The short answer is that the 68kMLA uses over 200 gigs of disk space, as of this writing, between the content database for the forum, the media for the forum, and the existing wiki. In addition to the other stuff wthww hosts, both in terms of disk space and other resources, hosting at a cloud provider was beginning to cost approximately a car payment.

The second part of that is, on the hosting provider we were on, burstable disk activity was fine but continuous activity was severely limited, which was sometimes causing some problems with day-to-day forum activity, and more problems with larger maintenance and update projects.

The new hardware will allow the site more room to grow, and will make future upgrades easier and cheaper for us.

Second, why did it take so long?

Well, that’s still down to the size of the site and the limitations of our previous hosting arrangement. That continuous activity is most of what caused the long wait as the forum was migrated out of that hosting arrangement.

We’re still working on the last of the changes and fixes, so if you find any errors, please let us know in our brand new bug tracker thread:





And, if you’ve got any other thoughts on this, we’ve got a meta discussion in the lounge:





Thank you again for your patience on this!

Best,

- Cory5412/Cory W.

 
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