Can we improve MURC with maybe SSL, Cloudflare

[UtwigMU]

MURC is barely useable.

We don't have SSL (although I would guess since server is overloaded this by itself would slow things even more). Letsencrypt is free and you just set a single cron.daily job and it requires no maintenance.

I always see 500-1000 users online though really 5-20 real people are browsing at best. At some point there were 8k users online and it was not due to Matrox lunching Luma cards.

We would need to add cloudflare maybe to get rid of bots.
We might also think of migrating to discourse although I see it's on latest version of vBulletin 5. I see vBulletin is not that expensive at $180

How large is the database? What kind of VPS are we using right now? We may have access to upgraded VPS free of charge. For example 5 years ago cheapest VPS machines were $5 for 2GB RAM, 20GB disk, now you get 2 cores, 4GB and 40GB in this price tier. Might just need to upgrade your VPS within the same tier with a click.

Search does not work, I searched for some old Matrox topics and could not find anything.

If we need money or time I can help.

From what I gathered we're on dreamhost where 1c/2GB/60GB vps starts at $15. With Hetzner you have Germany, Finland, USA and Singapore and you get 2c/2G/40G for € 5.18 or 4c/8G/160G for € 16.18. Digital Ocean or Linode are also options.

The MURC IP 34.198.163.60 resolves to Amazon. We are using Amazon DNS:
murc.ws nameserver = ns-128.awsdns-16.com.
murc.ws nameserver = ns-1990.awsdns-56.co.uk.
murc.ws nameserver = ns-815.awsdns-37.net.
murc.ws nameserver = ns-1092.awsdns-08.org.


Or are we just using one of hosting plans and not a VPS? Are we on $5 2c/512MB/20GB lightsail?

[Umfriend]

So I don't know what to say, understand none of that.

[UtwigMU]

SSL / https is using port 443 with SSL cert instead of http with port 80 with no cert with everything sent in plain text without encryption. It costs nothing as let's encrypt is free and once you set it up it autorenews.

We have many bots, sometimes server is busy and almost unusable, we need to mitigate that either by some filtering on the frontend or more beefy backend.

MURC is hosted on Amazon cloud. Top tier host, but if we are on cheapest plan, the server might have as much memory as you had in your PC during Matrox G400 days. I had 512MB in my P II with Matrox G400.

Amazon is more expensive than 2nd tier hosts such as Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean for a reason. If you want to roll out global cloud app, Amazon has the conveniently packaged services and others do not. The cheapest plans on 2nd tier hosts give you more memory and other resources than Amazon for the same price.