After hosting for three years with Orion VM, it’s time for Ausdroid to look at a new solution. We’re very grateful to those guys for hosting us for most of the last three years or so, and Ausdroid has grown immensely in that time. With some changes at Orion, it’s no longer practical for us to host Ausdroid there, and so we’ve looked for new answers.
We’ve considered dedicated servers, hosting offshore, and come to the conclusion that we should try this cloud thing. With our origins as an Android blog, we’ve decided the best way to meet our needs, and to stay true to our core focus, was to sign up with Google’s Cloud platform.
Without going into boring details, Ausdroid has now moved to a cloud-hosted server, with a separate database server and some other odds and ends to make it all work nicely together. Some of you may experience some minor interruptions due to changing DNS records, but by this time tomorrow, all the changes should’ve filtered through to various ISPs and their name servers, meaning users will have uninterrupted access to our new platform.
We couldn’t have done this without the support from our Patreon subscribers, who are directly funding the costs of hosting on Google’s Cloud. Equally, we’re delivering value for money, with the equivalent dedicated server solution quoted at almost twice the cost of hosting with Google, and not giving us nearly the same amount of flexibility and surge capacity.
If you notice anything broken or not working properly, please do get in touch or leave a comment on this post and we’ll fix it as soon as we can.
Great decision! Good work guys!
I wonder if you looked at other solutions like amazon or azure or was it fanboy decision?
It wasn’t really a fanboy decision. Wouldn’t really consider Azure, but I’ve used Amazon before and never really liked the interface. Google’s was more accessible. Plus, it helps that I have some experience with their Cloud Compute platform, having used app engine quite extensively before.
“and to stay true to our core focus, was to sign up with Google’s Cloud platform”
that phrase made me thought it was a fanboy decision. 🙂
How much traffic does the site generate? Could you have got by with a VPS?
We probably could get by, but the processing needs behind the scenes make a standard virtual server a little impracticable. Traffic wise.. maybe fifty to sixty gig a month?
Thought about throwing cloudflare in front of it to save some bandwidth?
Yeah we have; I’m thinking about doing something like that once I get some time to actually implement it 🙂
Cool.. it’s very easy (had to do it in anger once.. only took a few mins). You can start by hosting your DNS there which is a good plan even if you don’t end up sending your web traffic through it.
Great news! I guess that’s why the Ausdroid app has stopped working?
It’s only down while the DNS updates; the app backend is running in the cloud now, and once your DNS cache flushes, the app will see the new backend, and start using it.
Yup, thought that was the case. Thank you!