New server

Yesterday I commissioned and successfully moved Web Translate It to a bigger server. The move went smoothly and without any downtime.

Web Translate It was hosted on a server slice from Linode since December 2009. While I’ve always been happy with Linode’s service, one big bottleneck of server slices is disk I/O because the hard disk is shared with other customers. Web Translate It uses a lot of disk I/O for reading/writing language files or accessing the database, so it is really beneficial for us to move to a dedicated server.

Besides, we were using pretty much all the memory on the slice and it was soon time to switch to something bigger. I find slices with more than 4GB of RAM too pricey compared to what dedicated servers have to offer.

I ordered a new dedicated server from DigitalOne (this is also where the newly famous Pinboard.in is hosted). The new server has roughly the same specs than our old slice (1x quad core Xeon), but with a much faster and dedicated hard drive and 16GB of memory (instead of 2,5GB previously).

I started migrating the service to the new host early yesterday morning. Around 8AM GMT the master database server was moved to the new host, without any downtime. I spent a fair amount of time setting back up the server monitoring and the database replication server, which duplicates in real time the data streamed from the master database server. Later in the afternoon I switched the DNS to point webtranslateit.com to the new host so the new server could handle the web traffic.

I’m really happy with the new server’s performance so far. Intensive disk operations such as importing/exporting/updating language files are really much faster now.

I’m also currently working on other improvements to speed things up. I hope to be able to release these changes next week.

Thank you for using Web Translate It.