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+title: "Thank You, Steadfast" +date: 2021-05-18T23:33:29-04:00 +description: "" # Leave blank to use the auto summary +images: [] # Leave empty to default to the Pidgin logo +In a [recent post]({{<ref "/post/digital-ocean-sponsorship">}}) we talked about +our current infrastructure hosting sponsorship, but we've had another hosting +provider that has provided us a dedicated physical server for almost nine years. +That provider is [Steadfast Networks](https://www.steadfast.net), who has been a +silent but very important piece of our infrastructure. +In June 2012, a now-retired Pidgin developer who worked for Steadfast talked to +his boss and secured us a dedicated physical server for free. The server was +equipped with a quad-core Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 2.4 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM, and dual +250 GB SATA hard disks. Today these specs seem very modest, and even at the +time they were't exactly the "top of the line," but they were very impressive to +a project whose existing infrastructure consisted of two virtual private servers +with wildly inconsistent and underwhelming performance. After configuring the +server to use the hard drives in a software RAID-1 array (Linux md), we moved +our [Trac](https://trac.edgewall.org) issue tracking and wiki management system +to this generously provided server. +When we first started using Trac in 2007, it displayed relatively reasonable +performance. We were running it in an OpenVZ container-based virtual private +server kindly donated by another hosting provider that is no longer in the +hosting business. As the volume of traffic, ticket creation, wiki edits, and +ticket comment activity on Trac grew, we began running into performance issues. +At first, we ran Trac with mod_python in [Apache](https://httpd.apache.org/), +then moved to FastCGI in Apache. Guidance eventually became to run FastCGI in +[Lighttpd](https://www.lighttpd.net/), so we did this for quite some time. As +guidance later changed again, we migrated back to Apache, this time with WSGI. +We also made a number of changes to the database that stored all the Trac data, +which landed pretty quickly in [PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org/). We +did end up making a number of tweaks to the database, all in the name of trying +So where does Steadfast come into that history exactly? Well, in June 2012, as +we said earlier, but to be more specific, we had already made a bunch of the +PostgreSQL database tweaks and were running Trac in Lighttpd with FastCGI at the +time. And the move from the virtual private server to the real physical box was +hugely beneficial to us. +Pretty much every instance of Trac that was Internet-accessible inevitably +became a target for spammers. The spammers would flood tickets with comments +containing lots of links to various websites with the goal of taking advantage +of search indexing crawling the Trac content. In addition to needing to go back +through all the added comments and delete the spam, we eventually reached a +point where we had to implement anti-spam measures. The longer this battle went +on, the harder it was for the virtual server to keep up. We could never have +continued to run Trac with the influx of spam if Steadfast had not provided the +Equally important to us was the bandwidth Steadfast provided. They provided us +a 100 megabit port and never limited our traffic. We never fully utilized that +bandwidth for more than a few seconds at a time, but having it available was a +huge benefit to us. The amount of traffic our Trac instance saw, plus the +e-mail traffic Trac generated, was to us a substantial amount--an average of +a few megabits per second for a lot of our time on that server. Admittedly, +this would have been essentially nothing in the face of all the other traffic +Steadfast handled, but it was major to us. +In the end, we were hosted on Steadfast's network for just short of 9 years. If +we had paid for this hosting out of pocket, it would have cost us several +thousand dollars in that time. Thank you, Steadfast Networks, for being such a +great host to us for so long!