(RESOLVED) Emergency Server Upgrades; Temporary Planned Outage at 9:30 PM EST
(RESOLVED) Emergency Server Upgrades; Temporary Planned Outage at 9:30 PM EST
Hello everyone, I've been noticing an increase in gateway timeout errors, which coincides with large CPU and RAM usage spikes. In the hopes of preserving the quality user experience we've built so far here, I have little option but to upgrade the server. If the statistics are accurate, it would appear we have close to 30 users here now. This is an incredible amount of growth in a short period and something I was not expecting (this server has been running for only three days). At 9:30 PM EST, I will be temporarily taking the server offline and upgrading it to a higher plan.
If you would like to help support me with increasing server costs, a recurring monthly donation would mean a lot. All of the money (100%) donated to my Ko-fi (aside from PayPal fees) will be used exclusively for server costs, server backups, and SMTP relay (email).
Thank you for joining, and I hope to make this instance a place where you feel welcome!
EDIT: Looks like we're back up. Next time, I'll try to shut things down more safely, but I think we're ok. The server is now running on two CPU cores instead of one, 2 GB of RAM instead of 1 GB, and a fair bit more transfer. I will upgrade the SSD if needed, but keeping it at 25 GB will allow me to shrink the volume to a smaller amount of resources if usage drops off. Of course, my end-goal is to grow the server with the hopes that it is self-funded by donations.
I feel like that might have been a lot of my traffic 😬! Donation coming through.
Oh, this is great. I appreciate the support. Once I started this instance, my goals shifted from providing a baseline experience for a few subreddit alternatives to a more user-focused instance that tried to stand out with a specific focus, fair moderation, and a more politically-neutral tone than a lot of the other Lemmy instances out there (Lemmy.ml banning talk about China and such). I hope to have the instance fund itself through donations eventually, but I can pay for whatever costs are left over until we get there.