When I first created this website, I got myself a VPS (Virtual Private Server) to host it and also have some fun playing with servers in general.
I could probably host this website slightly cheaper if I only got the hosting service and I could probably get some kind of free tier VPS from AWS or Azure, but I had my reasons not to. First of all, I wanted to be free from huge corporations and their oppressive TOSes. Secondly, I wanted to ensure that my website is hosted in the EU and thus subject to EU copyright regulations. So, my precious bits and pixels are stored somewhere in Amsterdam.
The VPS had one CPU core and 1GB of memory and at the time was more than enough to host this website and some more stuff. Over time the site got bigger, the software got more resource-hungry and I added more and more stuff to run on it. At its peak there was this website, Monerelluvia’s website/portfolio, two instances of private wikis, an owncloud instance and a couple more tools. That was of course too much and when the server started crashing I got rid of some of the tools, combined the wiki and moved it to my home server instead. It worked for some time, a couple of extra years actually, but eventually even that was too much.The problem was that I really didn’t want to update what I had since I got a nice deal on it and at least for some time upgrades were significantly more expensive.
But I got the server almost exactly 6 years ago back in December 2018. The world was a different, simpler place back then. We didn’t know how it would be to live through a global pandemic, there was no threat of a global conflict caused by a little gremlin with a huge ego, most people didn’t know what NFTs, Crypto or generative AI were, and 1 GB of memory was enough to run a website.
Well, the crashes got more and more serious. I had to create a cron job to restart the database every time it got sniped for eating too much memory. So I finally decided to upgrade the server… and I soon discovered that it wasn’t as simple as clicking the upgrade button on the dashboard of the VPS provider. Turns out I’m two generations of VPSes out of sync and on a no longer supported platform. So I did the grownup thing to do and contacted support. After bouncing between various tiers of support I finally got to some engineer who knew what I was asking about and we agreed to upgrade to the newest version of their servers. For roughly the price of a Netflix subscription, which is slightly more than I was paying before, I got a slight upgrade of 6 cores, 16GB of memory, 200GB of SSD storage and a 10Gb network interface. So yeah, a noticeable improvement. For one, the database doesn’t crash every time I update something and there’s a ton of free real estate for other projects.
Whatever I decide to do here, please enjoy the new, snappy experience of this website and hopefully no error 500 for a while.
