Quick status update: Migration has begun. The site is currently 'in the cloud,' to coin a phrase. As more of the related stuff comes online, you'll see the bot/webbot return -- for now, you can simply ignore the errors the news page is throwing.
The site went down on April 18th, and came back up on July 25th, which is 98 days; before this, the longest downtime we've had since 2003 (when I started hosting the site) was under two weeks. Unfortunately, I simply don't have the time to deal with the hardware upkeep any more, so moving in to the cloud is a great time investment for me. If, by some unlikely event, we need to scale to a more powerful server, or increase storage space, or use more bandwidth, those are all things that are trivial to fix in EC2. For now, it looks like the current demands are going to fit fully inside of the 'free' tier of service that Amazon offers. Even if we manage to go over, this stuff is dirt cheap because of the massive scale of Amazon's operation, and I don't mind paying a little more than I was before if it saves me the headache of babysitting a noise generation machine in my basement.
As of yet, I have not tested whether Blizzard blacklists EC2 from connecting to Battle.net; I'll know more after I finish configuring the user sandbox it runs in, and I'll do my best to keep this thread updated. I have a contingency plan if that happens, but it will mean that the bot will potentially become less reliable than it was.
[update] Battle.net is accepting connections from EC2, and the webbot is back up. The new release of PHP is quite unhappy about my use of POSIX regular expressions, so it's throwing a ton of warnings. I'll get around to fixing that at some point, but otherwise things seem to be working.
Topic: Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) (Read 175 times)