New hosting provider in the works

[Handruin]

I've signed up for a cloud-based service that will potentially be our new hosting provider. The new host will be streamlined a bit more than we have now and will also be hosted on SSDs which should help performance. I plan to put together a test site first so I can get feedback from everyone before making the switch. I realize this can be disruptive due to propagation so I'll do my best to try and minimize that before we move. I'll keep everyone updated as I make progress. It may still be a couple weeks out but I wanted to give people time to be aware of the change.

Goals for this change are improved performance and reduced operational costs. If this works, it'll reduce my monthly costs by 50%. We also have the option to grow/scale if demand increases but our history suggests a flat and steady consumption of resources. If you have any questions or concerns let me know.


============demo site===================
http://www.qikl.us/forum/

 

[snowhiker]

Thanks again for running the forums here.

If for whatever reason, sometime in the future, you need additional financial resources to keep this forum up and running please let us know and we'll all be happy to help out. Or DD will just send you a fat check

 

[Stereodude]

Or DD will just send you a fat check

More like a server to co-locate.

BTW, thanks for running the site Handy!

 

[Handruin]

If anyone is interested I've setup a new domain as a demo site with the new hosting service. I've restored an older instance of our forum onto this machine and marked it as a demo site. If you don't mind playing around over there and providing feedback from your experience that would be helpful. Please keep in mind that none of your posts will be preserved over there so only use it for demoing. Please keep in mind I will be doing work over here so if things go down or offline it could be due to me making changes.

http://www.qikl.us/forum/

This is a 2 CPU, 2GB RAM, and SSD back-end storage. The host is physically located on the US east coast of New Jersey. I've installed the latest MySQL 5.6, php 5.6.7 with xcache, and apache 2.4. I'm investigating putting nginx in front of apache as I've seen it recommended for improved performance.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks again for running the forums here.

If for whatever reason, sometime in the future, you need additional financial resources to keep this forum up and running please let us know and we'll all be happy to help out. Or DD will just send you a fat check

More like a server to co-locate.

BTW, thanks for running the site Handy!

I appreciate the offers. many here have been very generous over the years to help out. I think we are doing good for now. If this hosting proves viable it will help in reducing a lot of the costs.

 

[Bozo]

Thanks!!!

Wow, the new site sure is fast.

 

[Clocker]

Wow. Navigating the demo site is noticeably faster! Great idea. Looks like a win-win.

 

[CougTek]

This is a 2 CPU, 2GB RAM, and SSD back-end storage. The host is physically located on the US east coast of New Jersey. I've installed the latest MySQL 5.6, php 5.6.7 with xcache, and apache 2.4. I'm investigating putting nginx in front of apache as I've seen it recommended for improved performance.

I may not be up to date on this, but last time I checked, some two years ago, MariaDB was supposed to be preferable to MySQL. I don't remember the reason, but there was something that made MySQL 5.6 slower for several operations than its predecessor. MariaDB was faster IIRC.

I'm no DB master though.

 

[Mercutio]

Let's update DNS and get over there.

 

[Handruin]

Let's update DNS and get over there.

I agree with your comment on the demo site. Normally I would have chalked up the slowness to vbulletin but the response time over on that server is so much faster for me. I don't know if it's due to the SSDs or maybe a system that's less over-provisioned than this one. The CPU/mem resources are actually less on the new server than here.

I want to make sure I've locked things down properly on the underlying OS before moving us over. I'll need a couple more days before I temporarily disable this site and do one last backup so that we don't lose any data. I also want to contact my current provider to see if I can update the TTL to a lower value before the move to expedite the DNS propagation for everyone.

 

[Handruin]

I updated the current DNS TTL to 1 hour for SF. By tomorrow this-time that change should propagate to everyone's DNS server which will give us a faster migration time once I make the move. An hour before I'll set the TTL to 10 min to help this along.

 

[Handruin]

I did a basic download speed performance test from this current provider to the new one. The new hosting service claims 250 Mbit Network Out and 40 Gbps Network In for this package.


handruin.com [~]# wget -O /dev/null http://www.qikl.us/download-test/1GBtest.bin
--2015-04-07 00:30:59-- http://www.qikl.us/download-test/1GBtest.bin
Resolving www.qikl.us... 45.33.67.65, 2600:3c03::f03c:91ff:fe18:9f4f
Connecting to www.qikl.us|45.33.67.65|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1073741824 (1.0G) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `/dev/null'

100%[=======================================================================>] 1,073,741,824 64.3M/s in 17s

2015-04-07 00:31:16 (61.8 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [1073741824/1073741824]

 

[Handruin]

This is just an informal notification that I will attempt to do the migration over this coming weekend. I'll send out a forum-wide announcement incase people don't see this post. Hopefully if the DNS TTL changes I made work as expected the migration/propagation should be relatively fast (30 minutes or so). I'll be disabling the forum here and the moving it over.