Summary: Improvements were ongoing at the back end (server side) of Techrights and we're done for now

AS part of work training, my wife and I study containers (with Kubernetes and all becoming more commonplace, it doesn't seem like Docker or at least containers are mere hype anymore). We also recently moved 4 databases, 3 of which belonging to Techrights, to a dedicated container of databases (MariaDB). The migration was done by the generous person who had kindly donated the server to us. It's an upgrade in terms of security and performance. 2 weeks later we're seeing improved site stability and we're also working to automate several checks and unsupervised remediation.

We've meanwhile dropped the locally-hosted (on the files/Apache side) databases to save a lot of disk space and improve I/O speeds. Goodbye, /var/lib/mysql. It buys us a lot more time as we've long been tight on space, which occasionally caused issues, including downtimes but never data loss (thankfully; we're very meticulous with backups).

There will soon be a hypervisor downtime, scheduled for password recovery. Other than that, we're probably OK for now.

Stay tuned for some exclusive reporting that's in the pipeline for days. This past weekend the site's traffic averaged at over 2 of gigabytes per hour -- a bit more than the usual (especially for weekends). The pandemic has not slowed us down and we'll try to speed up again, writing articles rather than working on the server side of things. Maintenance is important as it ensures the site's longevity. ⬆