AmiBay server specs

[k0x]

What server hardware is AmiBay running on? For past 6 month I find the site very slow on both browser and taptalk.

 

[Sardine]

its from 2012 and low spec. ( i think found the correct spec )

I think in 2010 the server was an AMD Opteron 1216 with 2GB ram and 250GB x2

but the last info i can find is below from 2012 and no upgrade since

Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.4GHz
4GB Ram
2x 500GB HDD in RAID mirror

and as we rely on donations to pay for the server we can't afford to upgrade.

even a spike in donations wouldn't see us into the future we would need a constant funding source.

Amibay is run by volunteers , no ads , not a single one and its free for anyone to use.

It has been discussed MANY times about upgrading but the server costs outreach our funding.

even a low powered quad core xeon with 16gb ram was out of our budget reach.

 

[davideo]

We have four members that donate every month through Paypal monthly payments.

This thread resulted in 6 additional members making donations.

A very low percentage of the total number of Active Members of 3,185

We would like to thank all the members that have made donations in the past and those that will hopefully make some in the future.

 

[fitzsteve]

I've got a spare C64 I can donate? No jokes aside I do in fact have a spare C64, I'll dust it off and put it up for sale with proceeds to Amibay

 

[Sardine]

that's very good of you Steve.

 

[davideo]

@fitzsteve

Thank you

 

[rcade]

Find a local IT company and ask them what they are throwing out. I throw out only 5 year old (4th Gen i5/i7) every week by the dozens. There are too many to deal with... Servers, same thing. 5 years and you can't sell or give them away.

I mean damn- almost nobody will give even $50 for your time to refurbish them. These are fully legal Windows 10 licensed and everything... Nobody wants PC's anymore for home, only businesses all still use them. For home, they just use cell phones.

 

[k0x]

OK am willing to help.

Who should I talk to?

Who is responsible for hardware, hosting, backups etc?
Who is responsible for site development - software maintenance etc?

What are the costs to host that old Opteron hw?

There are many options available today and feeding 8 years old server isnt like the best idea unless you have "free server hosting".

 

[chiark]

How about shifting to cloud hosting? Or too costly / unpredictable?
I must admit for the past 24 hours Amibay has been slow - could like be some form of DDoS happening perhaps? (Huge trend on DDoS increasing globally over the past months as part of a ransom attempt by bad actors)

 

[k0x]

@chiark - yes, that is point I would like to clear out.

What are current expenses for running old server. We could find out that for same or less money we will get 20x faster VPS or use AWS Lambda/DigitalOcean - you name it.

2012 specs is very very very old, together classic rotation drives. Even low specs hw/drive models today will make circles around it.

 

[Sardine]

you would need to contact Harrison site Dev, but he is usually very busy..

our current server is dedicated box in a data centre in germany, 1and1 hosting

cost wise i'm not sure but its not just the monthly server costs there are licences, maintenance and forum plugin charges as well as domain etc charges,

I don't know what it all costs over the year but when we discussed back in 2018

Server L16
Intel® Xeon® E3-1230 v6
4 Cores (HT) x 3.5 GHz
16 GB DDR4 ECC
1,000 GB (2 x 1,000 GB SATA)
lCentOS 7 with Plesk Onyx (64-bit)


was £60 / month and we couldn't afford that unless we / us the staff paid for it ourselves ( or shortfall )
in addition £14.99 every 3 months to support older PHP versions, plus our domain renewal costs

the current server ( as of 2018 ) was £35.99 a month plus the above additional costs

doesnt sound like much but thats £500 a year without the domain costs and any other costs associated with software or plugins etc or for the new server ( 2018 ) £800


this is from Harrison in 2018

This spec would give us a huge performance boost, going from a 6+ year old dual core Opteron to a 6th gen quad core Xeon. But the biggest boost for database processing would be the increase from 2GB ram to 16GB. We are already running on CentOS so that's no different, although the option to use Ubuntu Server 16 is also available.


This is just looking and seeing at the moment because as I already stated, even with the offers of help, I can't plan or perform any server migrations until after the summer. Until then I will utilise the offer of help from some of our server admin experienced members to attempt to get the current site and server running more efficiently and faster.


So for the moment it's more about forward planning. Working out what we could realistically afford monthly.


Also we need to factor in forum software upgrade costs. It's logical with a new server to also consider upgrading the forum software. The current vBulletin v4 is out of date and no longer developed for some time now, currently just in security maintenance status. The current version 5 is very mature now and we could buy the upgrade (with help from donations - we would need to request some donations to boost the account to aid our upgrades).. but I'm not 100% certain if vBulletin is still the best option, even if we stick with a forum format for the short term future of Amibay. The reason I say this is because after vBulletin 4 the company was bought out. When 5 was in development most of the lead developers jumped ship and since formed a new company and built a new forum platform from the ground up, ditching all the out dated legacy code vBulletin still have within it, and creating a new fresh forum software called. Xenforo.

 

[Locutus]

With such low performance demands and no ability to pay for a server up front, wouldn't AWS or Azure make sense by now?

Run a small EC2 instance to run the php board and use a managed SQL database, would be suprirsed if you exceed 30 euros a month of in fees.

 

[Sardine]

Harrison would have to answer these questions but from the tone of the debate in the staff area a dedicated box in a reliable data center with support was essential

virtual servers although cheaper was a poor option at that time, something to do with if the "real" box got busy then the virtual servers hosted on it would suffer.

I don't know the reason behind it all but being able to manage your own separate box was a big plus at the time.

maybe in 2020 things have changed but thats for Harrison to look in to / costs etc.

also Harrison posted this September 2020

Finally the current core issue with Amibay. We are creaky and falling over all the time due to a server from 2012, limited budget and a very old and out of sate forum platform. We need to bring it into 2020 to fit this. Based on our limited budget we are quite restricted, but I'm hopeful to find a solution. It needs to happen.

and Nov 2020

Our current hosting data centre, 1 and 1 has just merged with another company they acquired some time ago who specialise in cloud and virtual hosting solutions. The new company we are hosting through is now called 1&1 IONIS. For us this could be very interesting because they have stated in some press interviews that they are going to be developing some new virtual cloud based hosting solutions that will be adjustable to a clients requirements. This might end up being a more affordable way for us to upgrade to a more powerful hosting solution. I've requested more information when it is available, so am waiting in hope.

and

As you are all aware the site is slow. This is down to using forum software for something it was never really intended, but it should be able to cope. It is also down to all the bot traffic.


For years I have wanted to migrate Amibay to a much more suitable software platform designed for buy it now auction style community ecommerce. There are a few interesting options available. Some free, some commercial. Normally the saying that you get what you pay for is true, but as you all probably know this isn't always the case with software.


Among the options there are full ecommerce platforms such as Magento that have commercial addons to allow multiple sellers. This is one option. Another is a premade standalone community selling software. Another is to use a well supported ecommerce auction style plugin for an existing CMS. Wordpress and Joomla have a few different ones to explore. And then you have ecommerce plugins for forums such as vBulletin that we currently use.


Using a plugin for a forum platform can seem a good idea, because it continues to offer the same membership profiles and forum chat areas, alongside the sales sections, but in my experience forum plugins that offer ecommerce solutions often lose support as their developers lose interest or the actual forum software moves to a completely new version. So there is no guarantee of continued support and updates using such a setup.


I'm going to start exploring our options over the winter and hope we can work on a final solution in the new year. We need time to test out and play with a shortlist of available software options once I've reduced them to the ones that offer what we need as a site. I'm going to start with Magento as I already know the software quite well from building standalone ecommercial stores with it. I will also be exploring the auction style options for Wordpress as that could be a nice platform as it would allow all staff an easy blog style way of editing and updating overall site content and moderating.


Nothing much else to add here yet.

Cheers.

 

[Sardine]

How about shifting to cloud hosting? Or too costly / unpredictable?
I must admit for the past 24 hours Amibay has been slow - could like be some form of DDoS happening perhaps? (Huge trend on DDoS increasing globally over the past months as part of a ransom attempt by bad actors)

since around 2017 this has been the main issue ( server too busy or page not found + very slow response with low member activity )

Server sluggish and displaying tonight "Server busy please try later"

As posted in the feedback thread, it all currently points to the Chinese Baidu Spider bot flooding our server with concurrent spiders logging our content.


I've tried blocking the site via the robots server file and by adding agent exceptions to the server's htaccess file. However I've now read that this approach worked for many when they started to have problems with these Chinese search bots, but the search engine has now coded them to completely ignore the robots file, which is against internet protocol, and they also seem to be getting around the htaccess agent exceptions, so they also seem to be coded to avoid, ignore and pretend to be something else to get around that too now.


I will be keeping these measures in place as I expect they are still blocking some of the attempts and helping us a bit, but I think I will have to blanket ban China access in total at the moment to attempt to return full access to the site to our members.


Please, if any other members spot other search engines with a high number of connections on a single day please report it here. If left to their own devices even Google will flood a site with hundreds of bots, but with the restrictions that is contained to about 25 on average which is more than enough to keep their search engine logs up to date. If you see any engines with over 100 bots than they are avoiding our settings just like the Chinese ones.


Not really sure what these search engines hope to achieve by flooding a site so much it produces a DoS attack, although you have to wonder what Chinese and Russia bots are actually doing. Are they just logging content for a commercial/public search engine, or are they also working for their governments and looking for additional data about members and content they can utilise in other ways.

 

[idledk]

Hi, just tagging along as I really appreciate the work you guys put in to this, and might be able to help.
Just to get things straight. You currently run on your own server, that you have bought your self, that you get hosted at 1&1?
Ideally you would like to just have that hardware upgraded, to replace your old server?

 

[NoPyroNoParty]

Would this stuff in the robots.txt help?
From https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/v...-troubleshooting/4443583-chinese-web-crawlers

Sitemap: /path/to/xmlsitemap.php

User-agent: *
crawl-delay: 1

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admincp/
Disallow: /modcp/
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /members/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /new-content/
Disallow: /auth/
Disallow: /register
Disallow: /uploader/url

User-agent: BaiDuSpider
Disallow: /

 

[johnklos]

I think many of the people here who are suggesting "cloud" or VPS hosting don't realize how much that can put you completely at the mercy of a company that may not be good at communicating. It's easy for people to recommend it, but until you've dealt with the nightmares that can come from moving to a lowest-common-denominator environment, it's better to respect the decision that was made to stay away from that.

That said, I'm happy to offer to host / help host / offer backups / offer staging / testing. I physically own and colocate my own servers and have experience hosting large dynamic sites. Let me know if I can help.

 

[idledk]

I think many of the people here who are suggesting "cloud" or VPS hosting don't realize how much that can put you completely at the mercy of a company that may not be good at communicating. It's easy for people to recommend it, but until you've dealt with the nightmares that can come from moving to a lowest-common-denominator environment, it's better to respect the decision that was made to stay away from that.

That said, I'm happy to offer to host / help host / offer backups / offer staging / testing. I physically own and colocate my own servers and have experience hosting large dynamic sites. Let me know if I can help.

Without this turning in to a cloud/no-cloud I fully agree.
If you need the performance nothing still beats own hardware. Just did a quick EC2 search, and with SSD, decent amount of ram and some v-cores, you are looking at 0.4 - 0.6 USD / hour, for a reserved, up front.

 

[k0x]

Almost 5 months passed since my original posting.


@merlin posted today "site needs new hosting". What a revelation!



Merlin proposed 50GBP as monthly budget including managed service - well this is very bold suggestion, but am afraid not workable.




One very picky thread with one guy vanished.


So I will repeat my question.


Do you have the site/os fully under control now? Do you have root access?

 

[Sardine]

no, and I raise you your 5 months and call 3 yrs on you we have been waiting since 2018 when it was decided an upgrade was required.

harrison has the keys to the site and will not give us root access due to ( and quite rightly ) him having customer sites of his tied to his account.

so giving us full access would also give us access to his customers.

or something to that effect which he explained to us.

Harrison has offered to help move the server to its new home and upgrade to the VB5 which the site paid for a few months ago.

although you say £50 is not enough , that's all we can afford ( and if we don't get donations the staff chip in, but as long as Ive been a mod the site has self funded since ) and if its not enough then Amibay will be no more or will forever just get slower where it stands right now at 1and1 ona dual core amd with 4gb ram.
.