cubeupload

Back in the saddle!

Added 2020-10-15 22:51:37 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone!

First off, we really must apologise for being so quiet on Patreon. As you can image, this year has been quite challenging for everyone, and unfortunately we have needed to focus on our jobs and personal lives during this time.

Now, on with the news!

New Server Platform

We have successfully migrated our service to a new cloud platform this month. Our old webserver had the website and all images on it. Not great if something very bad happened...

The new platform is running on the Hetzner Cloud service, and all user images are now stored on Wasabi, an S3-compatible object storage service. We have so much more flexibility with how we run the various components of the site, and it's made code updates very simple to do.

Better Deployment Tools

Ansible is an automation tool which lets us quickly deploy code updates, build new cloud servers, update configurations, and a host of other things. It means we can create a test webserver and deploy the latest cubeupload site code onto it, just by running one command. Needless to say, it has made life very easy for us!

Site Updates

As well as the above move to Hetzner Cloud and Wasabi, we made a lot of improvements to the site behind the scenes as well. There are database optimisations which should make everything run quicker, bug fixes, and a few extra backend features to help us work with the next item...

Cloudflare

Our image hosting service is used pretty much all over the world. Our images and servers are located in Europe (Germany and Amsterdam to be specific) and although connectivity is excellent these days, someone using our site in the USA or Australia isn't going to have as good an experience.

Cloudflare is a web optimisation and caching service which has locations across the globe. We have seen a 35% speed increase for page loads, and the caching has drastically reduced the strain on our servers. When an image is viewed it gets cached by Cloudflare, not just local to the user but everywhere in Cloudflare's servers. All requests from then on are served by Cloudflare's cache rather than our content servers.

Onwards and Upwards

Now that we have laid the foundation for cubeupload's future, we are in an excellent position to continue the work we started a few years ago, which is a complete rewrite of the site with a new design and a number of new features: