New Server!

Last week we had some severe instability issues on the site, resulting in error messages on some pages and general slowness.

I'm not 100% sure what the cause was but I'm on the fence between just general growth of the sites reaching a tipping point, and another DDoS attack on Texture Haven. Both Texture Haven and HDRI Haven were running on the same server, so they were both affected.

We'd also been slowly running out of space on the server's HDD for a while so it was about time to upgrade anyway.

Our old server was a 4-core/4GB ram/1TB HDD "managed" dedicated server from Dreamhost, costing us $170 per month. I say "managed" because every time I ran into issues their support team would just tell me to solve them myself, defeating the purpose of paying a premium for help with management.

Our new servers (one for each site) are 8-core/8GB ram/1TB HDD dedicated servers from OneProvider costing only $15 per month each since they are unmanaged.

This over 10x cost reduction for a more powerful server might seem like a no-brainer, but I'm very inexperienced in the backend of managing web servers so it took me some time to learn by setting one up for 3D Model Haven before I was comfortable doing it for the big boys too.

They've been running for a few days (it took quite a while to get everything off the old unresponsive server) and things seem quite stable, though there's some unusual network activity on the TH server and some occasionally high disk bottle-necking on both.

In future there are some relatively easy potential upgrades we could do if things get bad again:

• Use Backblaze or some similar cloud service to host the huge asset files, removing much of the bandwidth and disk stress on the servers.

• Improve caching on the site to avoid unnecessary database queries.

• Use a separate high performance server or managed service for the database.

TLDR: New better cheaper servers which are more stable and give more budget to content creation.