Blah Blah Cafe, the Jean-Michel Jarre forum

Hello all,

I'm planning to migrate the forum to a new server/OS in the near future. Due to the overwhelming amount of bot-traffic to this website (for some reason) I am looking into measurements to take. This means an upgrade of the OS. The best way to do this is to do a clean install and add some counter-measurements with that.

This won't be done within a month, I will be migrating some other websites first to test. The Zoolook forum will be the last that will be moved. I will keep you updated here.

To give an indication: this is the CPU usage in the past month.

The past hour was crazy...

I added an extra core on monday to ease the pain.

This is disk usage in the past month:

You can see it at the start page:
In total there were 93209 users :: 21 registered, 3 bots, 1 hidden and 93184 guests active over the last 24 hours

These are mostly bots.

I have decreased the amount of forums and topics a Guest user can see, to reduce bot traffic. I will be migrating the forum itself to a new server soon, since I now have more time.

As a guest before I log in there are no forums visible, just says "This board has no forums"
I noticed last night over 1400 guests online & the forum had slowed to a crawl, took at least 2 minutes to load fully

The "guests" are bots (not identifying as bots) coming from a range of IP addresses which means banning an ip-range is more effective nowadays. It's almost giving me a headache.

Progress on the new server: I migrated jeanmicheljarre.nl there (and some other websites) and successfully installed Anibus. It does a bot check just like cloudflare does, which is good. I will do a migration of zoolook this week and I'll do some testing there too.

I will move the zoolook.nl domain to my own hosting provider. This means I have easier control over moving the site to a new server. I got the moving code from Beatle and I will move it tonight. This might result in a temporary downtime, since the DNS of my hosting provider has to propagate the settings to the old server.
Once that is done, I can start with the real job: moving to the new server.

Domain has been moved

I'm planning the migration on Sunday evening. It's usually the quietest moment.

Server is migrated. Also updated to 3.3.17.

If you experience any problems, let me know via email or in this topic.

Next step will be configuring Anibus for this website.

All good here, no issues so far

Planning a migration to a newer server/OS.