So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much.
I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most.
(With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.
I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.
Anyone looking to host something big should check out bare metal hosting like Datapacket, Reliablesite, FDCServers, etc. Down side is total lack of handholding and other cloud features and the fact that you can't scale up without redeploying on a new box, but the upside is ridiculously cheap bandwidth. The bandwidth cost is by size of pipe, not gigabyte transferred, and pipes upwards of 10gbps are affordable.
OVH and Hetzner are also worth looking at but aren't quite as cheap bandwidth-wise.