dissonant.dev

the very first vps remembers the times before dissonant.dev, while it was still called something else. i will not be listing this name here - it got renamed for a reason (that reason being that the name was already used by some french guy. oops! remember to do a google search before you choose a cool name... chances are, they're already taken.)

fxtumblr is hosted exclusively on pandemonica now (whose name i affectionally shorten to pandy). whether another server for load balancing will show up - only time can tell; right now i'm considering a setup which spins up on our main vps, franky, and takes over the tpmblr.com domain if needed. uptime has been good enough so far that i haven't done this yet, but who knows!

in other news - there is now a dissonant.dev wiki. the old file mirror at files.dissonant.dev has been taken down - it did not host anything of substance (but if you somehow want something that used to be on it, let me know!).

2024-12

pretty much everything has been moved over from our old VPS, arisu, to our new VPS, franky. all the services are now containerized with Docker, which makes things like updates fast and painless. no more manual messing with my 3 separate postgresql instances (why did i think it was a good idea?), now every container has its own... and yet, memory usage is pretty low :) (around ~1GB out of 4GB idle)

franky is a CX22 instance hosted on hetzner. she has 2 CPU cores at 2.1 GHz, 4GB of RAM and 40GB of storage. she handles pretty much all of the dissonant.dev services now, except for fxtumblr.

fxtumblr's an interesting case - since it's user-generated content, i don't have much control over what the generated renders will contain (other than blocking a post after the fact). it would be pretty trivial to post some heinous stuff, then craft a malicious takedown request to get my whole vps taken down, which would make me lose my personal data - and perhaps more importantly, make fxtumblr go down for hundreds of users.

for this reason, fxtumblr now sits on another server, whom i've called pandemonica. this tiny (but blazing-fast!) vm has been graciously provided by domi, and is currently set up in a load-balancing setup where it handles half of the requests for tpmblr.com, with the other half being handled by our old server, arisu. i intend to keep this setup going for as long as arisu is still alive (my old vps provider is shutting down their current service and offering a new one at a marked-up price, which is why i had to switch).

after that, we'll see - the load-balancing is really nice since it means that even if one instance goes down or starts throwing errors, the other one will keep working (though i still need to implement better error handling - the server on arisu sometimes gets locked up complaining about the analytics db being stuck, too many file handles being open, etc. - maybe some weird leak in how we handle files?).