Those who have visited our site for many years probably already noticed it; CD Freaks is always changing. Most of the changes we have done made that we attracted more visitors. At the time we started we were happy with 1000 daily visitors, nowadays we handle 75.000 vistors on a good day (newspage and forum). This means that at any given time there are several hundred people connected to our server at once!
It's too much!
We started at a free webspace account provided by Lycos, at that time it could easily handle our traffic. Unfortunately, as we grew, we had to move on to a paid webhosting account. After a while, due to our massive amount of visitors, we were forced to hire a server only dedicated to serve visitors of our site.
At the start of this year we decided to buy our own server. Our current AMD Duron 850, with 1 GB of RAM and a Maxtor 20 GB HDD is still able to serve the thousands of visitors every day, but on top moments it becomes slow and we have to take measures to decrease the server load (e.g making the forum register only).
To avoid any possible future problems we have decided to upgrade our server. Our current hardware will be replaced and our site will from then on run from the following components:
The RAID solution will make sure that data written to our server (e.g. if you post a reaction) will be written to both hard disks. This makes sure that if one of the hard disks fails the other one takes over without any data loss. The upgrade of the CPU should make sure that visitors have faster loading times. (Currently the site could be twice as fast)
Backgrounds:
Our server is located in a secure server room in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. With a 100 Mbit network card it is directly connected to a 155 Mbit line that has a direct connection to the rest of the internet. The company providing this service to us is Grafix Internet Solutions, which is also one of our sponsors and also makes this upgrade possible, by sponsoring our connection and the installation of the new hardware.
Besides Grafix there is also another group resposible for making this possible. Thanks to the people who have donated money to our Paypal account we were able to pay for this update. We would like to thank everyone who has made this possible and hope they will feel their money is wisely invested!
The upgrade:
There is no date set yet when the update will be performed. If the site is down, you are probably the witness of our server upgrade, just wait a few hours and come back!
Again thanks to all who have made this possible, our frequent and daily visitors, our great team and everyone else involved in the site!
Source: CD Freaks.com
