Forum server migration 🎉

Organisation Forum
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I’m pleased to report the OpenEnergyMonitor community forum has been successfully (I think?!) migrated to a new server this evening/morning. Please report any issues…

After an initial hiccup due to a couple of duplicated database records, the migration process went smoothly. This is a testament to the awesome open-source forum platform and the hard-working Discourse dev team.

For the last 6 years, the OpenEnergyMonior forum has been running from a docker container on a dedicated server. This server was requiring increasingly more work to maintain, so we decided to migrate the forum to a new server.

The forum is now running from a docker container hosted on a Digital Ocean Droplet virtual machine. The Digital Ocean Droplet architecture is really cool since it will let us increase CPU / memory or storage with only a couple of clicks therefore we only use (and pay for!) exactly the correct amount of compute resources we need. This is a far better environmental solution than running an ageing over provisioned dedicated machine, as we were doing previously. We’ve intentionally started off with a minimum spec Droplet and will upgrade if needed. I’ll be monitoring the system performance closely, please let me know if you experience a degradation of performance compared to previously? Some temporary degradation in performance is expected as the Cloudflare CDN cache rebuilds.

As we had previously, we will have regular off-site backups to ensure if the worst happens we’ve got several secure copies of the forum data, currently only 4 GB.

Thanks for your support, sorry for the forum downtime this evening.

PS. If you want to use Digital Ocean for hosting your own projects, here’s our referral link for $100 of free credit: https://m.do.co/c/47dabd936ca0

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Good stuff @glyn.hudson - it’s thankless work so here’s a “Thank you”.

BTW I did much the same thing a while back for another community I’m in:

We’ve found the hosted version to be really good.

Also BTW, if you need another “off-site” location to store an encrypted backup I’d be willing to help by pulling it into my local server here.

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Thanks for your kind words. It’s great to see you’re also using Discourse. I’ve been very impressed with the platform, and it’s open-source which obviously awesome :slight_smile:

Good to hear that their hosted version works well, I did consider it, but it’s quite expensive at $100/month for 20GB of storage which is not enough for us, we would need to $300/month option. I also value the flexibility of hosting it ourselves, we also need to host and backup other parts of our website(s), so it’s not really much extra work.

Thanks for the offer of a backup, but we’re already sorted with daily multi-versioned encrypted backups in two different physical locations.

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From a moderator’s point of view, it’s a lot less work than the previous one, so me too.

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