Since the spring of 2013, the Tux Reports Network was housed on a Digital Ocean droplet located in the San Francisco area. Unfortunately there were problems with the site being unavailable. According to pingdom, the server was not accessible for 2 hours and 5 minutes yesterday. In fact, 46 incidents over the past few days have happened.
Technical support at Digital Ocean kept stating there wasn’t a problem – but – there was clearly a problem. The site would load in 2 seconds on one attempt and up to 65 seconds in another. MattW took a look last night and did some optimizations but within an hour of his work the site slowed to a crawl.
This was not a good situation, therefore, the droplet was moved. These were the basic steps.
- Take a snapshot
- Change the region of the snapshot
- Create a new droplet based on the snapshot
- Change the DNS
The site has been loading without incident since this move. While the loading on the WordPress side still needs some cleanup, it’s better than when the site was on a droplet in the SFO region.