As I mentioned in my last blog, there has been a steep uptick in traffic on the site, with my guess being people scanning the Internet for AI and "security research" purposes. While I've managed to get the site to a point where it appears stable, it feels to me that the machine we're running the website on is on the edge of what it can handle. I'm looking at graphs and monitoring the site basically all the time, which is causing a fair bit of stress and takes up a lot of time on my part. This isn't maintainable long-term, and I don't want to be forced to monitor the health of the site this closely.
To alleviate this situation, my intent is to set up a fronting web server (called a reverse proxy) to handle the large amount of traffic and filter out traffic that is just erroneous scans. Unfortunately the current hardware is running out of resource (mainly RAM), and the only way for me to be able to set up the reverse proxy host is to purchase new hypervisor server to host it.
In addition to being able to add this new system, there is another stability improvement I'll be able to make:
I'll be able to split the database used for FFB to its own VM, which will remove the ability for a website traffic spike preventing the FFB server from accessing the database and causing a crash (which results in rollbacks and all sorts of issues).
I may also be able to set up more resiliency for certain side-services like gamefinder and bowlbot, which I may end up switching to run on a container platform rather than in full-fledged VMs. Having two machines available should allow for easier auto-restart if they crash for whatever reason, and could also end up saving some resources overall.
To get a little bit more concrete, I am looking at hardware costs around the 2000-2500 euro order of magnitude, and the point of this post is to announce a donation drive aiming to get enough resources for that purchase, and possibly also cover some of the extra costs that this increase in traffic has caused (the AWS costs for the site have increased by a factor of 6 or so since the start of the year). That added extra cost isn't really a huge problem, and therefore that's more of a bonus if we get to beyond the cost of the server.
As with the previous drives for hardware, any donations made through the month of September this year will be considered part of this drive and I will award a new icon on coach pages for those who donate (any amount). Patreon supporters will automatically be considered part of this (make sure you have everything connected and a gold supporter icon on the site). Anyone donating during the remainder of August will also be included for the icon.
If you want to donate, click the icon top right on the site which will show you the options available to do so.
Thank you for considering supporting the site.
To alleviate this situation, my intent is to set up a fronting web server (called a reverse proxy) to handle the large amount of traffic and filter out traffic that is just erroneous scans. Unfortunately the current hardware is running out of resource (mainly RAM), and the only way for me to be able to set up the reverse proxy host is to purchase new hypervisor server to host it.
In addition to being able to add this new system, there is another stability improvement I'll be able to make:
I'll be able to split the database used for FFB to its own VM, which will remove the ability for a website traffic spike preventing the FFB server from accessing the database and causing a crash (which results in rollbacks and all sorts of issues).
I may also be able to set up more resiliency for certain side-services like gamefinder and bowlbot, which I may end up switching to run on a container platform rather than in full-fledged VMs. Having two machines available should allow for easier auto-restart if they crash for whatever reason, and could also end up saving some resources overall.
To get a little bit more concrete, I am looking at hardware costs around the 2000-2500 euro order of magnitude, and the point of this post is to announce a donation drive aiming to get enough resources for that purchase, and possibly also cover some of the extra costs that this increase in traffic has caused (the AWS costs for the site have increased by a factor of 6 or so since the start of the year). That added extra cost isn't really a huge problem, and therefore that's more of a bonus if we get to beyond the cost of the server.
As with the previous drives for hardware, any donations made through the month of September this year will be considered part of this drive and I will award a new icon on coach pages for those who donate (any amount). Patreon supporters will automatically be considered part of this (make sure you have everything connected and a gold supporter icon on the site). Anyone donating during the remainder of August will also be included for the icon.
If you want to donate, click the icon top right on the site which will show you the options available to do so.
Thank you for considering supporting the site.
