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A few words about outages, servers, and duct tape
Twilight Sparkle ✨ posted a topic in Castle Throne Room
We've had an unfortunate string of outages here at awkward times in recent memory. You trust us to provide a place to pony it up 24/7 and we've been failing to deliver on that. Sorry. I'll get to a technical explanation of why these outages happened in a moment but for tl;dr's sake, I wanted to let you all know that we were trying a little too hard to keep our hosting costs down and ended up with what we paid for when we duct-taped four boxes together and called it infrastructure. So what are we doing about it? This week, we got two fancy new servers - Mount Everhoof and Sweetie Shores (that's Pixel Wavelength's hometown, for those of you following our mascots' canon) - that won't suffer from the issue that kept bringing down our current setup. Work is already underway to move our everything over to them, which involves around ~3 TB of data and over 20 virtual servers. We're doing what we can to minimize downtime during this process but some maintenance windows will be unavoidable. Following @Poniverse on Twitter is the best way to keep up with these. The downside to this, and the reason it was put off as a last resort, is that this move significantly increases our hosting costs. Along with Ponyville Live!'s bills, paying for more reliability means there's less to spend on other cool stuff like giveaways, contests, advertising, and convention presences. We're also interested in exploring redundant infrastructure across more servers now that we have a proper LAN, but that's not financially feasible right now. The upgraded subscriber perks came at a good time as subscriptions are a reliable, recurring revenue stream we can count on every month when budgeting. Because it recurs, even a modest subscription goes a long way when making decisions about how much to invest into the servers that keep Poniverse online. Whether or not perks are your thing, we'd appreciate if you consider subscribing so we can keep things awesome for everyone. We feel like Buffy here when the servers are on fire. A special thanks to our donors, everyone who has opted into ads here, our commission artists and their customers, and especially our 14 current subscribers - you're making this migration possible, for the benefit of thousands of users. I'll update you all again once everything is settled into its new home. Technical details, for those who like such things