Hey everyone,

It's the time of year to renew most of our servers, so I'm in the process of making a few updates, tweaks and tests to keep things running smoothly, while trying to keep our costs down. We've been hosted on Amazon for years, and we'll continue to stay there.

  1. I'll likely be moving the site to a different availability zone with better support for different instance types and newer hardware. I moved the web servers for SteamTrades today, the SteamTrades database server will move tomorrow along with the SteamGifts web servers, and then the SteamGifts database server will follow. This could result in some downtime while moving the database server, but I'll know better in the next couple of days.

  2. I'm switching to newer load balancers with a few improvements and HTTP/2.0 support. This means I'm changing the A records for the domains. This shouldn't affect you because your internet provider will likely start sending you to the new load balancers within minutes of the change. However, I'll keep the previous load balancers online for 48 hours in case anyone has an ISP with a long delay. If you notice issues viewing the site a few days from now, this could be the reason.

  3. I'll be testing some different servers for our database with AMD processors and measuring performance to ensure they're comparable to our existing setup. This could result in minor downtime while moving to different hardware (15 minutes) and some slower page views for a small period of time as the database server rebuilds the cache.

  4. Add-on Creators: I'm going to setup our web servers to only serve gzipped data. SteamTrades starting now, and SteamGifts starting tomorrow. A high amount of our traffic comes from various user add-ons and scripts, and reasonably priced bandwidth is not a strong point with Amazon. If your add-on already scraps our data with gzip support, you won't have an issue. If it doesn't, then you'll likely just need to add one line of code to your script to decompress the data.

That covers most of the major changes, and if all goes well, you won't notice a thing. Nonetheless, if you experience any issues during the next week, please let me know.

5 years ago*

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Thanks for the heads-up.
I think in section 3. the word "comparable" is supposed to be "compatible"
Cheers!

5 years ago
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..."comparable" sounds like the best choice, there (in my Very humble opinion, obv)

5 years ago
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Oh, "comparable to" means something different than "comparable"... that makes sense now. Thanks!
P.S. I was doubtful that such a well-spoken admin has made a mistake in the forst place.
Anyway, bumping the topic is good for whoever hasn't seen it yet.

5 years ago
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bumped cause thought was kinda funny that such a big change was really "unnoticed" by us :D

5 years ago
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I was really sleepy, I saw it in the top threads and decided to leave a comment. So that was almost a year ago? Wow...

5 years ago
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