New Home For RCT

RC-Thoughts.com has a new home!

New Server Hardware

Since Hetzner came out with their new AX-line with reasonable price (well, debatable…) I thought what a heck, let’s go for it. So now RCT is on dedicated server with quite impressive specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Hexa-Core “Matisse” (Zen2), 6-core 12 threads
64Gb DDR4 RAM
2 x 512 GB NVMe SSD
1 Gbit/s connection
Unlimited traffic

Overkill for a website with this amount of visits and usage? Absolutely! Only too much might be enough! But so much fun!

Ever since I started to host Phoenix-files I’ve had issues with traffic going over the old host limit, this issue is gone since traffic is now unlimited.

Server is in Falkenstein, Germany. Since I’m also using Amazon Cloudfront CDN for static files like images, fonts etc I’m quite confident speed should be usable globally.

Cost? Not cheap unfortunately, just shy of 50€ a month, but it’s my little toy-box so it’s fine. And you guys are very kind with occasional coffee-donations so at least I don’t run out of coffee :)

Software

I’m old-fashioned, I like Debian. So as usual for me RCT is on Debian 10.2 minimal, running Nginx as web-server. As new feature I’m now running FastCGI Cache on RCT and it does have on positive impact on page loading speed since pretty much always user will get a static file bypassing php and mysql-backend totally.

WordPress is using php 7.4 and mariaDB, pretty much everything also goes through unix socket-based memcached for additional boost on those cases where FastCFI is not used, this includes non-cached pages like contact-page etc.

RCT have also been IPv6 compliant for some years now, this have not changed with new server, both IPv4 and IPv6 are fully supported as before.

Performance

As I always try to keep my site as clean as possible I’m every now and then checking the results with some test-pages, and quite happy with results:

GTMetrix

Pingdom

Google Insights

Security

As unfortunately security with websites is a thing one have to think about these days RCT is on SSL encryption with appropriate settings. Some other undisclosed security-measures are also in place on the server.

Perfect?

Most likely not, there’s always something that could be done but this should be a great starting point. But you know, me I like to tinker with this kind of stuff!

In case of issues

As always with new things there might be issues, in case there is drop me a line through contact-page or by email to info at rc-thoughts.com!