New Server Location
As I mentioned in the previous article, last month we reached the limits of what our shared hosting account could provide. I had been watching our resource usage for almost a year, crossing my fingers that the server admins wouldn't notice. When we were unable to handle a substantial number of our existing customers being online all at once during day 1 of the last patch release, it became obvious it was time to look for something new.So we made the substantial monetary investment, and got ourselves a dedicated server. We spent weeks settings it up and making sure the site had all the same functionality as before. And while we were just twiddling our thumbs waiting for April 1 to launch, we received the long-feared notice from our old host that we were in fact consistently using almost twice as many resources as we were alotted.
NginX
When I had originally read on forums about NginX, I always thought it was pronounced "In ginks." Not until I bothered getting a box running with it myself did I learn it was intended to be pronounced "Engine X." We have completely eliminated Apache from the equation and use NginX to deliver content with almost the same speed that we had been getting with our Content Delivery Network. With all of our tweaking, pages that at best were processed in 280 milliseconds on our old server are now being processed sometimes less than 100 milliseconds.When it came time to launch today, however, the URL rewrites that had been working fine in our tests all last month no longer worked once we switched the DNS to point to our new server. It took a while before I figured out how to get NginX working with vBSEO and our custom rewrites, since the instructions with vBSEO are insufficient for all but the simplest setups. For those interested, you can't use try_files, and you need to manually set REDIRECT_URL before handing off the request to vBSEO.
New Look
We have changed the default style of the site to something we feel is much cleaner and fits the theme we are pushing with the impending VaultWiki 4 - getting outside the box. There's still some cleanup still to be done with the style, but I think it's already better than the stock vB style.Of course, customers can use the Style Chooser in the site footer if they want to see how VaultWiki will look on an unmodified style.
We've spent a lot of time trying to reduce latency by using CSS sprites, and we've redesigned the Members Area (yet again) to make it more useful.
Vastly Improved Security
We've been planning this one for over a year - getting an SSL certificate from a trusted authority, allowing the connection between us and our customers to be encrypted.It had long bothered me that we offered an installation service where we requested user login information, and this information was being transmitted over an "insecure" connection. Now I can rest easy.
Another significant investment that shows you we are a real company that cares about the integrity of our products and services.
Upcoming Changes
While we will now be focusing fully on developing VaultWiki 4 until the Alpha 1 release next week, here's what else we're planning for the next month.With the SSL certificate, we'll be able to add more payment options. First up are Google Checkout and Amazon Payments.
We'll be adding a new section to Support very soon for issues and requests related to the functionality of this site. Currently these items are sprinkled throughout forums or the VaultWiki milestones, making it difficult to keep track of these particular items.
For now, Site Support items can be placed in the new (temporary) forum. If you run into ANY issues with the new site, please post them there.
In closing, I'd like to say a few words about the title. I couldn't figure out what version of the site this would be. While it's our second VaultWiki "dedicated" server, it's really the third site move for VaultWiki, and the fourth redesign / restructuring of a VaultWiki site. With all this confusion, and us using NginX, I'm satisfied with version X.
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