In preparation for the Driftmoon mod system, we've moved our servers to Google App Engine. Why spend a week moving everything? Speed!
Our old server was a virtual server from Amazon. At first I enjoyed running my Ubuntu Linux that hosted the whole affair. But soon I realized I had to install security updates every week, and every now and then bang it with a screwdriver just to run Wordpress. And it wasn't powerful enough, oh no! The server was barely adequate to serve our small userbase, being sometimes sluggish, sometimes refusing to answer outright. And yes, I had to shout at it. It could never run with the additional traffic that our new modding system would generate.
My first instinct was to rent a bigger server, but they're prohibitively expensive. What I really wanted was to make sure our webpages load fast, and that we have room for expansion if we get a sudden surge of visitors. Had you linked to us from your own Facebook page, our server would probably have crashed! That is, assuming you have a lot of friends, of course.
App Engine promises to upscale our website gracefully by adding more servers when needed, and they provide the first instance for free (at least for the moment). My language of choice was Java coupled Eclipse, and I have plenty of experience with both. I rewrote most parts of Wordpress in Java over the past couple of days, and now I'm turning my attention to the server side of the Driftmoon modding system.
The website can now scale up to thousands of visitors per second, so feel free to tell all your friends about Driftmoon! ;)
PS: Did you know Driftmoon probably exists?
