In Review, January 2023

Server Outage

On Jan. 11, sunny.garden’s hosting provider OVH suffered a global outage on their cloud storage service, affecting thousands of fediverse servers (and probably millions of other customers). During the outage it wasn’t possible to upload or receive posts containing images, video or audio.

After 2-3 hours OVH was able to resolve their issue, and service returned to normal.

Media Backups

While the OVH outage caused no permanent loss, it did motivate me to finally set up backups for the media files.

sunny.garden’s database (containing account information and posts) was already being included in whole server backups, and being backed up to a second OVH datacenter, but media files had been relying on OVH’s cloud storage redundancy.

Media files are now being backed up to a second OVH datacenter, and media and the DB are both being backed up to a completely separate storage provider.

Because the media backups only include files posted by sunny.garden users, and not cached from other servers, the cost will be minimal, probably less than $1/mo.

Media Upgrade

At the end of the month I also moved the media storage from OVH’s Standard storage, to their High Performance storage. Their standard service stores files on magnetic hard-drives, while their high performance service stores files on NVMe SSD drives. In my simple tests, bulk transfers (like running a backup) are now about 10x faster. This will cost a bit more going forward, maybe $5-$10/mo.

Hopefully this makes things feel a bit snappier while using the server, although whether you notice a difference as a user may depend more on other factors like how far you are from the datacenter, current network conditions, the speed of remote servers, etc.

If nothing else it reduces load on the server and makes maintenance easier, as backups and media cleanup tasks now complete in minutes instead of hours.

Summary

The monthly active user count in January continues to be gradually approaching 400 or so, down from the peak of about 1000 in November.

I’m somewhat tempted to re-list the server on joinmastodon.org, but at the same time cautious about dealing with any future signup waves.

I did list the server on fedi.garden which is a new directory highlighting small to mid sized servers, so we’ll see if that gains any traction.

Hosting

sunny.garden’s hosting costs and donations for January:

Thank you, to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m able to cover the costs myself if needed.

– Brook