We’ve been working on moving to a new server all week, and we’ve just finished the transition. Best of all, we’ve switched to the new servers without any downtime in-between. Our new server is a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo and with 3GB of DDR2 RAM – all thanks to the awesome guys and gals at Lunarpages, the best host there is.
A lot of work has gone into this transition in hopes of raising the performance – and more importantly, the reliability – of our server. In the past year (since we first started our hosting with LP), we’ve gone from several million hits a month to dozens of millions, and our old server took quite a hit. To that end, we’ve focused on deploying lightweight and highly-optimized code all around; hopefully there will be no more un-expected downtime… ever.
Our current software setup is very complicated, but hopefully it’ll take us all the way to 0.00 minutes of downtime – that’s our goal! We have multiple application servers and programs running in the background each doing what they best – instead of the traditional have-the-web-server-do-it-all way. At the moment, we currently have a software stack comprising of a tightly-knit mesh of these products:
- Windows Server 2003 Standard SP2
- IIS 6
- LightTPD 1.4.x
- Tomcat 6.x
- MySQL 5.1.x
- PHP 5.2.x
- XCache 5.2.x w/ homebrew integration into most of the scripts on this site.
- Tons of custom ISAPI filters and plugins to boost compatibility, flexibility, and performance.
- Proxy servers running redundancy – should an application server fail to load a particular page, a backup server running on the same machine should take over.
All this is in hopes of maintaining the highest levels of uptime and responsiveness for our users. With applications in as high-demand as EasyBCD and articles linked to from all corners of the web, it’s quite painful to have any downtime at all – especially when it means that all our content is unavailable for a length of time.
We’ve just moved to this new server hours ago (and hopefully you’ve moved along with us) – we don’t expect any miracles in the first week or so, because as with any completely new setup, it’s fraught with possibilities of bugs and incompatibilities with previous setups and all. Hopefully however we can pin them all down and be on our way to greater availability in no time.
In the meanwhile, if you spot anything out of the ordinary or see something amiss, don’t hesitate to post a comment and let us know, it’d be greatly appreciated.
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You’ve had lots of problems with PHP and Windows/IIS. Why don’t you just use a *nix system?
Hey Michael,
If this doesn’t work we’ll probably run Linux in a VM. We need Windows in order to run some C++-based server components for a couple of client-server apps we use.
But hopefully this will work out!
Congrats on moving to the new server 😀 … now if only my site traffic at the same level as your site, i probably move from vps to dedicated too lol