Moving Servers
I’ve been very quiet with updates and news in the last weeks since the Delicious rumors. The reason for this is that I’ve been working on moving Zootool from Rackspace to a German hosting company called Hetzner. We’ve been with Hetzner in the early days of Zootool and switched to Rackspace to make use of the advantages of cloud hosting about a year and a half ago. Cloud hosting is pretty cheap as long as you don’t need big, powerful servers or a lot of traffic and after thousands of Delicious users switched to Zootool and imported their bookmarks it wasn’t possible to continue hosting with Rackspace as it got far too expensive.
With Hetzner we get two times more server power for half the price, which is quite amazing. It’s always tough to move a webapplication, especially when it continually grows. It took me about two weeks to setup everything and test and prepare as much as I can. Today I’ve migrated the MySQL database to Hetzner, that’s why Zootool has been down for about one and a half hour. This makes it possible to keep Zootool running on both ends – Rackspace and Hetzner – and to switch the webserver almost seamlessly. Unfortunately it also means that Zootool is going to be very slow until everything is moved over to Hetzner. The reason is that the webserver is still at Rackspace (Texas, USA) and the MySQL server is in Germany now. The latency for queries is a lot higher as if the MySQL would be in the same datacenter – imagine that each and every request has to travel across the Atlantic! This slows down everything. I’m very sorry for this inconvenience and I’m trying my best to move the rest as fast as I can. I hope for you patience one more time :)
Cheers,
Bastian
I’m sure anyone who uses the service (especially former Delicious users like myself) should appreciate the efforts you’re making!
Rich | January 25, 2011
@Rich thanks man! :)
Bastian | January 25, 2011
Thanks for the update. I had wondered why it was slow.
It’s a great service and appreciate the work you’re doing to make it even better.
Thanks!
Richard Lalchan | January 25, 2011
@Richard as soon as all the DNS servers are updated, it should be faster than before for everybody. I’m really glad about your positive feedback!!
Bastian | January 25, 2011
Which servers will be using ssd? Because it’s truly amazing how much of a difference it makes.
Ryan Collins | January 26, 2011
@Ryan it’s only the database server. the ssd makes a huge difference there. for the webserver the difference won’t be big enough to go for ssd. It’s also crazy to see that people started to add a lot more stuff since!!
Bastian | January 26, 2011