Bharat buys a new toy
The server that hosts this website is actually located in a small dark room in a seedy part of San Francisco. It’s inconveniently out of the way and I only go and visit it in person once every 6 months or so (usually at 3 AM when something has gone horribly wrong). I keep it 30 miles away in San Francisco, locked in a dark room because there, for $50 a month, I can get 10 times the network bandwidth and 3 times the speed that I can get with a DSL or cable modem connection. This is an incredible deal; normally companies pay $200+ a month to get this kind of deal. I get it for a quarter of the price because some friends of mine and I are sharing the data center space and splitting the costs.
Dell PowerEdge 2650!
So why do we need 10 times the bandwidth and 3 times the speed? I host 10 domains on this website. 9 of them together generate probably about 175 thousand page views a month. But the 10th site is the the Gallery website which generates 3 million page views a month. Not bad for a little cottage industry, eh? There are plenty of big companies that struggle to get that kind of attention.
The problem with getting a lot of attention is the poor little second hand server that powers all this web traffic is having a harder and harder time keeping up with the load. When I release a new version of the Gallery software (like we did yesterday), things slow to a crawl because thousands of users can show up to check it out in the span of an hour.
To remedy this problem, I decided to invest some of the cash that I’ve received in donations for the Gallery project into buying a new Dell server. Now for most of you, this probably won’t be terribly exciting. But for me this is totally cool. I’ve been creating and maintaining network infrastructures for almost 10 years now but this is the first time that I’ve actually bought a machine expressly for the purpose. The money that I used to buy the server was entirely from donations made by happy Gallery users. It’s almost a self-sustaining operation now 
So the good news is that this website will run faster, as soon as I drive up to San Francisco and replace the old box with this new one. Maybe this weekend…