hosting of the tsvn site

Hi,

As you may have noticed, our server at tortoisesvn.net had some problems
in the last few weeks, usually for half an hour or so where it was
almost impossible to reach the site.
Now, I know that our server isn't really a power horse and maybe just
can't handle the load we get. But I'm not sure about that: after a
release we usually have much more load - and the server could handle
that quite well back then.

I've already rented another server yesterday which has a little more
power. But considering the huge amount of work this requires (setting up
all the apps, moving the databases, reconfiguring everything, ...) I
already have nightmares.

But: do we really need all this? Let's recap why we set up
tortoisesvn.net in the first place:

1) FAQ: easier to edit the FAQ and have users add entries themselves,
taking some of the work off us
2) Docs: uploading the generated docs without having them in version control
3) nightly builds: some place to upload our nightly builds
4) issue tracker: the tigris.org one can't be configured to prevent
non-project members from creating new issues, which lead to sometimes 5
bogus issues a day and a lot of work to clean them up
5) automatic scripts to generate statistics (e.g., translator progress)

all valid reasons. But let's check each one of them again:

1) Well, the FAQ isn't easier now. And the ratio of good comments which
add some value to the FAQ against comments which are support requests
and would belong to the mailing list is at least 1/5. So instead of less
work for us, it's actually more. Also, searching in Drupal is horribly
broken, which makes the FAQ there almost useless.
--> moving the FAQ back to tigris, maybe even all entries on one single
page so users can use Ctrl-F to search for things wouldn't be that bad.

2) That one is actually quite good. Of course, the docs for the release
builds don't change a lot, which means having those in our /www
directory on tigris could be handled quite well too. Only the docs for
the nightly builds should maybe stay on tortoisesvn.net

3) those definitely have to stay on tortoisesvn.net, there's no way to
get those on tigris

4) since we use Flyspray, we'd have to keep that running on tortoisesvn.net.

5) do we really need those? If yes, we could write a script that
generates a static html page in our /www directory, and that script
would be run once a day together with the nightly builds. Or Lübbe could
run it manually from time to time and commit the changes to tigris.

As for the rest of the pages on tortoisesvn.net, we could easily move
them back to tigris.org.

If we just keep the issue tracker, the nightly builds and nightly docs
on tortoisesvn.net, I think our server could handle that without much
problems.

And the advantage of having most of the pages on tigris? Easy: if
something goes wrong, someone *else than me* has to deal with it.
Because if I check the last three weeks, I think I spent more time
dealing with the server than I spent with coding.

So, what do you guys think?
If you agree, I just hope I can step back from renting the other server...

Stefan

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