I know, I know, OK? (1 Viewer)

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(serious question) What's the upgrading stuff for? Improved performance - is page response better than (say) this time last year? Better sys admin features?
 
(serious question) What's the upgrading stuff for? Improved performance - is page response better than (say) this time last year? Better sys admin features?

Yeah it's mostly about trying to keep performance good and stable, but also attempting to keep things easy to manage and (of course) to keep costs down. The most frequent updates you'll see will be to the Joomla & Xenforo side of things, but I also need to manage things on the server side too.

Because i am lazy this is an edited version of something i sent to some of the freeloaders hosting stuff on the server last night so may not directly explain what's been going on.

So the more observant among you will have noticed that your site or sites fell over a few times earlier today. This is a direct result of me trying to be clever with the allocation of resources between my web server and my database server after I changed some database settings to improve performance on the forum side of things and which meant the database server needed more memory, so I took it from the web server thinking it would be ok... and it wasn't.

I suppose I should actually explain the current set up first. Back when I started hosting your stuff it was on the basis of me having extra resources available on the server, so why not use them? Then in September 2013 I switched from what was at that point a dedicated server in France with OVH.ie to a virtual server with dediserve.com, hosted in a datacentre here in Dublin. My reasoning at the time was that it would be a little bit faster and it would work out cheaper, but for various reasons (like me deciding to separate the database server from the web server instead of running both on the same virtual server), only one of those worked out as planned. This was, in hindsight... unsurprising.

You probably already know that one of the benefits of using a virtual server is you can customise it very easily - you just pay for the number of processors and the amount of memory & storage you actually need. So, over time I gradually reduced the resources I was paying for to a level that kept the show on the road, and here's where we're at now

CPUs x 4 (3 in the web server & 1 in the database server)
RAM - (3GB in web server, 3Gb in database server)
SSD Storage 81GB x (51GB for web server, 30GB for the database server)
There's also some NAS storage for offline nightly, weekly & monthly backups.

Sooo where was I? Oh yeah, I made some database changes on Sunday night (changing the storage engine from MyISAM to InnoDB for the forum database tables, in case you're curious) and as a result I also had to increase the memory allocated to the database server since it caches these InnoDB database tables in RAM (still with me?). I took a chance on taking some memory from the web server and reallocating it to the database server, which seemed to work, until the server got busy (or busier than a bank holiday, when I was doing my testing) and everything eventually fell over.

Earlier today I put an extra 1GB of RAM into the web server, bringing it back up to 4GB, which should prevent it crashing again from running out of memory, swapping stuff out to disk & getting progressively slower and slower until Apache effectively locks up and stops serving web pages.
 
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TL;DR!

It sounds to me like you're serving two audiences. 1) Your side-line web-hosting business for family/friends and 2) us lovely forum users. I'm guessing the forum is the most active resource of the whole lot & probably requires most of your attention in applying updates? Would it make more sense to spin the forum (webapp AND db) off to its own virtual server and leave everything else on the other virtual server (maybe you'd need a db server on that also if any of those sites need a db backend). That way, you can apply any custom tweaks (caching/web server) on the forum side without any risk of taking down the whole house. I'm probably not wrong saying that the thing that will inevitably need resources thrown at it in the future is the forum and not the other websites. Makes sense to me to disentangle it from the rest of the operation and treat it as its own 'thing'.
 
Yeah but the sideline is my charity work - only happens if there's spare capacity.
 
Next thing I'll be doing is moving away from cpanel / Apache to nginx. That'll be fun.
 

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