Loss

[BOB]

Forum is finally online. Thanks, Alley!

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Horay, we're back. Thanks guys, sure it was no end of pain. Seriously... thanks.

Did we ditch OVH in the end?
Given FL needs such a specialised environment to perform optimally does it really make sense to use a hosting provider?

As was answered before (before moving to OVH, as far as I remember), hosting provider is used due to DDoS protection and connection stability/speed- OVH also has hardware firewall.
What FLServer needs is powerful CPU and number of cores isn't relevant for it because it uses only one thread. But there's also forums, teamspeak and other things like minecraft.

There isn't anything magical that these companies do. A hardware Firewall is relatively easy to setup. As for DDOS protection methods I'm sure there are publicised best practices that we could research and implement on servers of our own.

FL dedicated server, TS, and the forums + wiki strike me as completely separate services. Wouldn't it be nice if the Game server went down and the forums were unaffected?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a complaint, just a suggestion for how we could improve our infrastructure.

FL server could have it's own physical box running some small dual core that is easy to clock to really high speeds. The forums just need a standard LAMP or IIS server depending on what back-end they use. TS could probably be put on that server as well given how minimal the load would be. Minecraft could be put on another box or put in a VM on the webserver used for forums.

These 2(or 4) servers could sit behind a another box which acts as a Firewall and has some clever DDOS protection setup.

Hope this doesn't offend anyone, what we have works and is fine, but wouldn't this setup be a lot better?