Article information
Hello all,
Before I leave for a couple of days, finally some good news.
A) Yesterday I upgraded our website package at our hoster to include a firewall (against e.g. botnet attacks) and a CDN (content delivery network) service, which should generally help with performance. As our site is regularly accessed worldwide, it will help to have this CDN service to get some load off of our server and also ensure that the server is not impacted if some part of the world is experiencing internet issues or DDOS attacks. Or so I understand. This raises the server costs a bit (20 EUR/month extra), so if you want to help carry the load, click on that beautiful PATREON link at the top of the site. Any help is appreciated. :-)
B) Emails can be sent again since Thursday night. The issues were also caused by the increased server load. With the changes described in (A) it should hopefully prevent this to ever happen again. The email communication channel is important for us, as a lot of you are sending in valuable information for the database and we would like to be able to reply to you, naturally. Also, initial or temporary passwords are sent via email as well, so the mail service working is obviously quite important for users as well.
C) Caching via ACPu works again as well. This should also result in better website performance, especially on pages with a large number of workers or tag teams. It's just one of the technical quirks of our database and a result of it being completely custom-built and at this point over a decade (or two) old. Never touch a running system, right?
Anyways, I am off for a couple of days. I will check in from time to time, though, to check whether everyone was able to behave like a civilized person. ;-)
Matt Macks
