Situation Update for January - 2017
We’re approaching the end of January, and we’re starting to have fires pop up. I want to detail some of the issues and obstacles we are now currently facing.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is not very happy with us. They have recently contacted us about our bandwidth usage and asked us to get an Enterprise plan. We use 350+ Terabytes of bandwidth per month for Mixtape.moe. On top of using a huge amount of bandwidth, Mixtape.moe, Cloudflare is very peeved by how 40% of our traffic and bandwidth goes to Asia, specifically South Korea. Asian bandwidth traffic is expensive.
The Enterprise plan for us would cost us $7000, and I’m not sure we can get to keep South Korea on that plan still. So now we’re left with the options of:
- Get a $7000 Cloudflare Enterprise plan and possibly drop South Korea
- Get a $300 Cloudflare plan and drop South Korea
- Get dropped from Cloudflare by force
I don’t know about you guys, but those are some crappy options. Why would we want to abandon 30-40% of our user base? That’s insane. We’re not entirely sure how to handle this. Making our own CDN setup would be difficult. I’d like to get a dedicated server instance for Japan + South Korea to munch on.
Our Main Server
Our main server’s host is forcing our dedicated server plan to increase by $82 starting February 1st. The new server monthly cost will now be $359, up from $277/mo. This couldn’t have come at a worst time. We’re really struggling to pull along on donations each month. We had to add the new storage server, which was $99/mo more, and now we’re paying almost that extra now by force.
If we can’t afford the main server for new month, we’ll be forced to shift everything onto the main storage server. Services like GitGud may slow down a lot.
Previous Storage Server
We have a Hetzner server that served as the secondary storage server before the new storage server, and now is mainly a backup server. We’ve been transferring all of Mixtape off it to the new server, and it’s been taking a long time. Between the terabytes of files being moved and the secondary Mixtape track bandwidth, the server went over the 20 Terabyte limit from Hetzner and is now throttled to 10Mbps. We don’t have any extra money to pay for extra TBs. Track 3 has already been migrated, but Track 4 is still in the middle of transferring, and now it’s going to take a very long time to finish. We’ve setup Track 5 on the new server to start sending files to. But this means Track 4 files will be served from this 10Mbps server for the foreseeable future. Large files may become a nightmare to load.
Mixtape 2.0 and Accounts
We’re almost finishing up on the Account system. Currently we’re working on tying the Mixtape rewrite with that and getting the frontend completed. When that’s all done and ready to go, I’ll write an extensive blog post on the new changes, the redesign, and how the accounts work. I’m really excited about this, I just hope we get the opportunity to make it there before we hit a major financial wall.
We want to provide the best quality service that we can. Hopefully next month, we won’t have to sacrifice that quality to stay alive.
If you’d like to Donate, visit: https://mixtape.moe/donate/
