Server Plans
Nanashi, our main site server, is already becoming all too weak to carry out her daily duties. She often cries and has been ailing for quite some time. We've all seen the random moments of pure tsuntsun, tracker errors, and unexpected site errors, and most of the time, for no real reason.
We have managed to calm her nerves enough to run relativey stable for now, but it's only a matter of time before she finally snaps and just can't handle it anymore. We could rent a bigger server at a greater monthly cost, but within our price bracket? Not a chance. We've been running on the cheap since forever here at ABs, squeezing as much performance out of our meager resources as possible, and so, to jump up in (mainly) RAM and CPU spec brings us into premium territory. Nothing is wrong with this, but really, for this kind of cost, we may as well look into colocation... so we have.
We'd like to start raising funds for a rackmount server to colocate in a datacentre and tend to it ourselves. Although the initial cost is high, our monthly running costs will be reduced, and we then also have a much more convenient upgrade path with our hardware. The suggested build is to be a Supermicro rackmount with opteron 4100 CPU and 16GB RAM (maximum supported is 64GB) with the great gift of IPMI and KVM. More details, and a more comprehensive list of parts will follow, but we are still pricing around at the moment. With that in mind, we have come to around a £1000 target for the server build and initial payment for the colocation.
Holy moses! That's a lot of money; why's that better than renting? 喂!这也太贵了吧!租服务器不是很好嘛!
I hear you say, well, in the short term it isn't better than renting another server, but as we continue to outgrow servers at an alarming pace, we are forced into higher brackets of rental servers. None are very well balanced to our needs, which will result in either taking a server with less than optimal spec, or having a surplus of resources we don't use, and pay for...monthly. There are also upgrade costs to consider—one-off upgrades for rentals are priced like my tax bill: ridiculously high. More often than not, the only choice is to add a monthly cost for the extra hardware, making it even more expensive. With our colo, we have the one-off cost of the hardware itself, and that's it.
Well, what about the current server? Will this be neglected in the donations in sacrifice for the server pool? 现在的服务器呢?捐款会不会被私吞?
Absolutely not. We will have a secondary pool for the server fund, and we shall keep open record of how far we have got. We intend to manage this by having our regular donations fill first, and the surplus to go to the server fund.
How about Tentacles? Isn't the code growing old too? Tentacles如何?是不是代码老了?
Our developers are focusing on a bunch of cool features and enhancements for our next major update. You can read about their projects and progress over on the dev blog; we've written a blog post to go along with this newspost, so head on over there after you're done with this newspost for a look at just one of the things we're doing for the next generation of Tentacles.