TL;DR, moving to a dedicated server. Also some updates later in this post.

Since we moved to a VPS in February, I've been closely monitoring the resources of the server. I've kept just ahead of it, with our disk usage around 90%, RAM usage around 90%, and using 90% or more of our monthly bandwidth allocation. This was deliberate, we don't want to pay more than we need to.

I've added a little RAM or disk space occasionally, and this time when I opened a ticket to request some more, they said "hey, so we have this deal at the moment". One thing led to another, and now we'll have a dedicated server for $45 USD a month, still in the Auckland data centre.

The specs are as follows:

CPU: E3-1270v5
Ram: 64GB
Disk: 2 x 1TB SSD
Traffic: 10TB

It's much more powerful than what we have currently:

4 vCPU
9GB RAM
160GB SSD
Traffic: 1TB

I have already transferred over everything except Lemmy itself. So all the alternative frontends, our help pages, and the survey software now run off the new server.

Also, currently we have almost entirely moved off of Cloudflare. Currently they are still providing the DNS nameservers but there is no proxying or caching happening anymore, and we seem to be doing ok. I'll be looking at that last step at some point, but it's awfully convenient having a Cloudflare API to automatically set up TLS for any new subdomains so I have some investigation to do there. Anubis appears to be able to stop some 90% of bot scraping traffic, which I'm pretty happy with since we don't have the Cloudflare blocking rules anymore.

So anyway, the plan is about 8:30pm this Friday I'll take down Lemmy, back up the database, transfer it across and load it into the new server. This can take some time, expect an hour or two of downtime if everything goes well. If you want to follow along, join the LemmyNZ Matrix chat room.

Feel free to ask any questions about anything and I'll do my best to answer!