Server consolidation

After a week of not running any services and not hearing any complaints about it, I cleaned up and shutdown both our original server and the “new” one that I planned to move to over a year ago but turned out to be too underpowered for our needs.

The-BOB was founded Feburary 21, 2002 after a vote in the old forums about what to call the place. “Brotherhood of Blogs” was chosen.

“cricket” was the 2nd iteration of the original “cricket” server that originally hosted The-BOB and a few charter subscribers. The second iteration that was recently shutdown was hosted at serverpronto for $29.95/mo with 200GB bandwidth transfer limit (pretty paltry these days). It was an intel celeron with 512mb of ram which turned out to be pretty horrible as the number of mysql users and web visitors increased over the years. I’ve had the server since November, 2004 and over the years have paid  about $1,855 from subscriber fees. I set this server up during junior year of college when Chelsea School District (CSD) asked me to remove the original “cricket” server that I’d had parked in their datacenter since graduating in 2001.

The “cricket” name comes from the cricket monitoring system which I had been toying with for CSD during high school. It worked out pretty well for graphing the district internet connection which was pretty interesting, but Merit was doing the same thing so I dropped it but left the server in place and on the internet when I graduated.
The “new” server was set up around March, 2008. I had been wanting to move to a new server for a long time since I knew the old one was pretty outdated both in terms of hardware and software (running FreeBSD 4.9!).  Aplus.net had a decent deal for $79,95/mo for an intel celeron server with 1GB of ram running Fedora. So we got a much cleaner more modern OS with slightly more memory, but the same crappy single-core celeron processor. After moving about 60% of subscribers to the new server over a year’s time, it became clear that even the new box could not handle everybody. Over the course of the year that we had this server, we paid about $1,052. That $79 fee plus the $29 fee for the original server was straining The-BOB budget and Mr. MasterCard was not too happy.

Around this time a server at work became available after running out of warranty and usefulness. An HP DL140 with 4GB of memory and a dual-core intel xeon processor. It only had an 80GB drive so I bought a 160GB IDE drive and added it to the system. I also started checking out Ubuntu server which is totally built for systems just like this. “colo” was born and installed at a datacenter in Southfield and has been completely happy ever since. The extra memory helps but I think the greatest thing is the dual core processor because MySQL can be processing some hefty query on one core while the other core is free to serve content to visitors. It works out really well and load on the system is very very low.

I moved people to the new server over the course of about a week thanks to a script I wrote over a weekend that zipped up a user’s directory, copied it over along with their web stats, dumped and imported their mysql DB, and then set up apache and DNS for their domain. What took a year to go from cricket to new now took a week to go from cricket+new to colo. Very cool.

And the rest is history.

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