[masraum]

Originally Posted by Superman

I clearly remember a post by Wayne, many years ago during the heyday of this site, in which he said something to the effect of: "The computer that runs this site is sitting next to my desk. If you saw it, you would laugh out loud."

It was probably an ordinary desktop tower. Apparently, the hardware needs are not great and there are standard forum software packages available, running fine on many sites. But apparently, the key is desire, know-how, attention to detail and good judgment. Those resources seem to have walked out with Wayne.

I suspect things have changed substantially since those days. It may be less about the computing power to power the forums themselves and be more about all of the stuff required to make sure that the site is rarely ever down. I seem to remember that Wayne said that he taught himself how to perform the routing for multiple connections in case one went down and a bunch of the "programming" required to have the forums do what he wanted.

I don't think we've had any of the issues here in a bit that we were having.

These days it would probably be relatively simple to put the forum "in the cloud" so that you could leverage all of the resiliency that's baked into "the cloud." With multiple Internet connections, DNS load balancing, and things like VMWare with the capability of V-motioning a server to whereever at the drop of a hat, things would be pretty stable most of the time. It just takes time and money.