Another Main Site Upgrade - Help Requested over the next week

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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,513
5,804
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Hey readers,

As many of you may have seen I have aggressively moved from a small VPS to a much larger one and using Amazon CloudFront to do content delivery. It has finally come time to move from VPS to full cloud hosting (hello Amazon EC2.)

Just to give you an idea of where I am at with this, I have two dev instances running 24/7 now and have just wiped one that will become the production instance. I have the OS, Apache, MySQL, and php up, WordPress installed, now I just need to migrate the data (this may happen this weekend.)

In short, over the next 10 days, if you experience anything weird, please let me know. This is going to be a big change for the site and hopefully all goes well. Late July 2011 the site saw ~9s load times! Way too long!!!! The fastest I have gotten to since then has been just over 3 seconds. Much better but I want to get to two. One second, times thousands of users each day is a lot of time saved.

Also, if anyone is interested, I would be happy to share thoughts and learnings on this.

Coincidentally, the forums will stay hosted separately. Load times are largely dependent on user images per thread display which I cannot do a ton about.

Cheers,
Patrick
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,513
5,804
113
Just tried doing a cut-over... that went poorly!

Will try again this weekend. I am really trying hard not to re-do everything.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,513
5,804
113
Main site is swapped to Amazon EC2! More than double the amount of memory already so this is good. I have it working from three different network locations using VPN and using tracert. If anyone can help test that would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Patrick

Edit: looks like DNS is dead.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,513
5,804
113
It is the .htaccess file I am thinking now. DNS resolves properly to 107.22.*.* and front page loads. Next links in do not load which usually mean .htaccess. Working on this now.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,513
5,804
113
OK all should work now... looking much faster too!