Thanks for your patience as we work through some speed issues we’ve had for far too long. This has been very frustrating for my team, not to mention expensive.
Just today I was reading an article on my local news site about hackers. There’s been plenty of talk about hackers, whether it’s because of the password leaks because of hacks into LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the hundreds of other high profile sites/cases, or because of the hacker influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Hackers seems to be a far away thing, not really impacting our day-to-day life (that’s arguable, I know). But it has definitely impacted me, my developers, and my users, every single day.
Just yesterday we had a pretty light day… only a few thousand hacking attempts were made.
Only a few thousand.
It made our server slower, because instead of just serving our users, it had to address the hackers requests. So, users write us and report that it takes 20 or 30 seconds for a page to load.
That is ridiculous, and unacceptable.
My team gets distracted because I say “stop what you are doing and let’s address this.” That means that what they are working on gets put on hold… and JibberJobber evolves and improves slower than it should.
This problem is frustrating and expensive.
It is also demoralizing to everyone involved.
We have a plan moving forward, though. It’s like Plan B, but really, Plan L or J. We’ve been working on this problem for years.
I think this is the right plan, though. We have a new server admin involved, and will be switching JibberJobber to Amazon’s hosting environment. That makes me nervous just typing it, only because when we first launched JibberJobber Amazon was having all kinds of reliability issues… it just didn’t seem ready to host our stuff yet.
But I think it’s time. We’re moving forward on switching to Amazon, the pioneer and leader in cloud hosting. Inherent in that move should be always-the-best hardware, as well as anti-bad-guy software to keep the hacking down. Those are two great benefits of the move.
In addition, the new server admin will be working on finding and identifying any place that he can help, including speed optimization, security, and other stuff (contingency, code delivery, and other things the developers will know about, but users typically won’t see).
I hope that this change brings noticeable differences… faster JibberJobber, more reliable uptime, etc. I appreciate your patience as we’ve worked our way through this, and look forward to having my developers spend more time on making JibberJobber better, and not as much time on reacting to bad guys.
Jason, I think this is a good move to Amazon Cloud. I have an excellent hosting company for my WordPress sites, but I have attempted to use Amazon for some file/video storage stuff. I’m not on the platform, mostly because it was too difficult for me to work through the techie stuff Amazon needs and then interfacing that to my Host site.
But this is child’s play to SysAdmin types. And since you are moving the program and database there, everything is in one place as is now and you won’t have the complexities I had without knowing what I was really doing .
Different complexities, of course. But if you are looking at great hardware, great CDN, good defenses against the bad guys and a green field for upgrades, Amazon, in my opinion, is a good choice.
Thanks Scot… Amazon’s interfaces are ridiculously complex and ugly, but aside from that, I’m pretty excited to move to this solution and hope that it proves to be a great place for my users.