This blog runs on two servers. One is the main PHP blog engine that handles the logic and the database, while the other serves all static files. Many years ago, an article I wrote reached the top position on both Hacker News and Reddit. My server couldn't handle the traffic. I literally had a terminal window open, monitoring the CPU and restarting the server every couple of minutes. But I learned a lot from it.
The page receiving all the traffic had a total of 17 assets. So in addition to the database getting hammered, my server was spending most of its time serving images, CSS and JavaScript files. So I decided to set up additional servers to act as a sort of CDN to spread the load. I added multiple servers around the world and used MaxMindDB to determine a user's location to serve files from the closest server. But it was overkill for a small blog like mine. I quickly downgraded back to just one server for the application and one for static files.
Ever since I set up this configuration, my server never failed due to a traffic spike. In fact, in 2018, right after I upgraded the servers to Ubuntu 18.04, one of my articles went viral like nothing I had seen before. Millions of requests hammered my server. The machine handled the traffic just fine.
It's been 7 years now. I've procrastinated long enough. An upgrade was long overdue. What kept me from upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was that I had customized the server heavily over the years, and never documented any of it. Provisioning a new server means setting up accounts, dealing with permissions, and transferring files. All of this should have been straightforward with a formal process. Instead, uploading blog post assets has been a very manual affair. I only partially completed the upload interface, so I've been using SFTP and SCP from time to time to upload files.
It's only now that I've finally created a provisioning script for my asset server. I mostly used AI to generate it, then used a configuration file to set values such as email, username, SSH keys, and so on. With the click of a button, and 30 minutes of waiting for DNS to update, I now have a brand new server running Ubuntu 24.04, serving my files via Nginx. Yes, next months Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comes out, and I can migrate it by running the same script.
I also built an interface for uploading content without relying on SFTP or SSH, which I'll be publishing on GitHub soon.
It's been 7 years running this server. It's older than my kids. Somehow, I feel a pang of emotion thinking about turning it off. I'll do it tonight...
But while I'm at it, I need to do something about the 9-year-old and 11-year-old servers that still run some crucial applications.
