Saturday 2 July 2011

In the very beginning, I had Lothere on a blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress.

That only lasted about a month before I decided I wanted more control of the layout. So I installed Wordpress on a shared hosting service, one of those $7-​per-​month things. That lasted a year or two, but I eventually got sick of the (shared) database server going down for no fault of my own and taking down my site for hours at a time.

So about three years ago I went all-​in and got a virtual private server at Slicehost for about $30 per month.

All of my computers get a name, and this server’s name was matilda.

Matilda

Like her namesake, matilda was valiant but small. For the last three years this site has been running on a server with only 256 MB of RAM and 10 GB of storage space. Thanks to the progress of technology, my iPod touch now has more computing capacity than matilda.

Also, I’m getting more traffic nowadays – both from readers and from spammers – and the site would occasionally crumble under the load, and go down for hours at a time, until I noticed the problem and rebooted it. Lately it’s been happening about once a week, which brings me back to where I was on my old shared hosting.

So at last I’ve moved to a bigger, meaner, uglier server…

Congal

I now have 768 MB of RAM and something like 25 GB of disk space, for about the same price.

If you don’t mind the smell of sweaty wolf, you should find that the site is noticeably faster now. I also fixed the broken preview images on the earliest chapters, and a few other small things.

However, the architecture of the new site is fairly different (geek translation: PHP 5.3 instead of 5.2, nginx as reverse proxy to Apache instead of bare Apache) so I expect there will be lots of new bugs.

You can tell me about those as comments to this post, or in the Bug Report thread in the forum, or if that fails, in an email. Anything sent to @lothere.com or @unforgetting.com will get to my inbox.

And I just noticed that searching is broken in the forum so I will go try to fix that…

Congal