Today marks Neowin"s 18th Birthday. Over our history, we"ve had a number of homes, from the nomadic early days where we bounced between sponsored hosts, to settling at The Planet for a while, until an over-zealous response to a DMCA request left us homeless, and then being taken in by Stardock, and sharing some space in amongst their servers. In 2014 we migrated into the cloud, and set up home on Amazon"s AWS platform, and that"s where we live today. We currently use four EC2 virtual machines to run the website - one database VM, and three web server VMs. We also have a fifth VM we use for development.
Moving into our 18th year, we"ve taken a look at our current setup, and decided to make a substantial investment in our infrastructure to give us greater control, flexibility and enable an improved development process. To that end, we have purchased three brand new Dell servers, along with switches and routers to connect ourselves to the internet.
Firstly, we have a Poweredge R740, with two Xeon Gold processors, plenty of memory, and SSD storage. This server will primarily be tasked with running the database and caching servers (MariaDB and Redis).
The other two servers are Poweredge R440"s, again with two Xeon Gold processors and plenty of memory. These will primarily be running PHP and nginx (and a little bit of NodeJS for MiniSpy) to serve up the website. Development servers and other internal tools will be spread across the three machines as resource requirements and availability allow.
Physically, the servers will be located in the UK in a tier 3+ datacenter, not far from London. The datacenter has full 2N redundancy across power, networking and cooling.
Over the next few weeks, we will be performing various bits of maintenance on the site to prepare for the move, and so you may experience short periods of downtime when you try to access the site. Don"t panic, it"s all part of the plan!
Follow our forum thread for updates on the progress of preparations, and look out for our announcement of the switch-over date, once everything is in place. Feel free to ask us questions about the new setup in the comments below, and we"ll try to answer what we can.
Update: The new servers are in place, and in sync with our existing setup at AWS. We will be making the switch over at around 1pm BST. The switch over will simply be a DNS update, and should only take a minute or two to take effect. That said, some DNS servers cache records for longer than they"re asked to. If you continue to see our maintenance page for more than a few minutes, it might be worth flushing your DNS cache, and considering switching away from your ISP"s DNS servers to either OpenDNS, Google or CloudFlare"s public offerings. Finally, if for whatever reason you have manually added entries for Neowin into your hosts file, now is the time to remove them.
After the switch, everything should be working as normal, but if you come across any new issues with anything on the site, please let us know in the Site & Forum Issues forum.
Update 2: If you can read this, you"re successfully accessing the site on the new servers!