- Joined
- Jan 24, 2018
- Messages
- 3,231
Hallo hallo,
I hope you all enjoyed the Lunar New Year and Valentine's day. We have two things to announce this time, our follow-up on the affiliate plan mentioned in the third anniversary announcement and our future server infrastructure plans.
Affiliate Banners and User-Submitted Banners
As was discussed in the Christmas thread and the Anniversary announcement, we've been exploring our alternative options to fund the site besides donations. This time, we'll be running a banner on the top of the site, clicking the banner will just lead to our affiliates page, which was always available through the info section of the navbar.
We currently have five affiliates, representing services we like or have helped us in the past:
[ul]sdbx.moe: helped us out with infrastructure when the site first began and we benefit from all purchases made on their site. [/ul]
[ul]Path Network: provides enterprise-grade security and DDoS mitigation and our image servers have never been taken down due to an attack on them. We don't get any benefit from mentioning them, but we're grateful for the service they provide to us.[/ul]
[ul]DDoS-Guard: provides DDoS mitigation to our webserver and they have some pretty responsive support staff, we get a bit back if you use our affiliate link with them.[/ul]
[ul]SauceNAO: They have our entire image archives indexed so you can reverse image search a page to find any series or chapter on the site, we just think they're cool and use their service a lot.[/ul]
[ul]Immortal Taoists: As you all know from the previous ad run, they're a Wuxia-inspired cultivation idle game that a few of us on staff play and like. They were happy with the ad run and accepted the offer to be on our affiliates page. We benefit from people installing the game via the affiliate link just like last time.[/ul]
We'll be accepting and reviewing submissions for new banners if anyone from the community would like to participate! You can choose whether or not you'd like to have your username credited under the banner you design if you submit one. The goal of the designs are to be humorous, similar to the banners we run during april fools' day. Parodies of memes or series using our mascot is encouraged! The first banner was drawn by Teasday, parodying one of the Wikipedia banners from 2010:
To submit a design, feel free to DM it to me directly on MangaDex, or through our Discord.
If you don't want to see the banner, the banner itself can be hidden by closing it as it'll add a "hide_banner" cookie that will persist until you wipe your browser history/cookies.
Infrastructure Changes
We've just recently ordered and are in the process of setting up a significantly beefier server with the intention of replacing the webserver, master database server, and API server with it. The new server will cost us $250 a month, while the webserver is $100/mo, master db server is $90/mo, and API server is $100/mo. Overall, this swap will save us $40 a month while making the site feel noticeably snappier. Currently the new server has only replaced the master db server but the webserver and API are up next. Once the API is on the new server, the cache issues that have been plaguing it will be fixed and Tachiyomi users will suffer no longer.
Following the trend of throwing more expensive servers at stuff, we plan on getting rid of the rest of our database slave servers and replacing it with another beefy $250/mo server. This will add a bit to our monthly server costs but will hopefully solve our database desync problems for good.
MangaDex@Home will soon be used for all image traffic on the site, no longer will the webserver be used to serve recent chapters to users. The MD@H network was already serving over 8 Gbps (that is inaccurately reported, actual number is much higher) on a regular day, after the change traffic to the network should basically double. If you want an easy way to contribute bandwidth to the network you can get a VPS from our affiliate sdbx.moe for this purpose by following the instructions at the bottom of the MangaDex@Home page. No knowledge of server management and/or running java programs is required. Alternatively, you can also run a client on your home computer, or get a VPS or server from another provider. Some knowledge of server management and/or running java programs is required. The more clients on the network, the better the reading experience for everyone!
The data-saver server and image cache server are no longer with us as we've figured out a way to offload even more stuff onto MangaDex@Home. Unfortunately, the data-saver to MD@H fix will take until next weekend to implement and our contract with the data-saver server ran out today. So for now, data-saver is broken and disabled by default until the change is complete. Getting rid of the data-saver server and the image cache server will save us $190 a month.
In the end, our server costs will look something like
[ul]1 API, master db, webserver - $250
1 slave database server - $250
1 slave database/image archive servers - $140
MangaDex@Home backend - $30
MangaDex@Home metrics - $30
CDN for site assets/DDoS Protection - $180
Reverse proxy - covered by Path
CDN for uploads - covered by MangaDex Network
Total cost: $880/mo (Prev. 920)[/ul]
Quite impressive that our server costs are going to go down during an upgrade. We greatly appreciate anyone who's donated to the site over the past three years, we couldn't have made it this far without you.
P.S. For anyone who's been donating BTC/ETC in the past few months, we're aware that the donation claim process isn't working at the moment (we've received the donations, no worries). Once we finally get through all of the current infrastructure changes and get the site stable, we'll fix the donation claim process. Thank you for your patience!
I hope you all enjoyed the Lunar New Year and Valentine's day. We have two things to announce this time, our follow-up on the affiliate plan mentioned in the third anniversary announcement and our future server infrastructure plans.
Affiliate Banners and User-Submitted Banners
As was discussed in the Christmas thread and the Anniversary announcement, we've been exploring our alternative options to fund the site besides donations. This time, we'll be running a banner on the top of the site, clicking the banner will just lead to our affiliates page, which was always available through the info section of the navbar.
We currently have five affiliates, representing services we like or have helped us in the past:
[ul]sdbx.moe: helped us out with infrastructure when the site first began and we benefit from all purchases made on their site. [/ul]
[ul]Path Network: provides enterprise-grade security and DDoS mitigation and our image servers have never been taken down due to an attack on them. We don't get any benefit from mentioning them, but we're grateful for the service they provide to us.[/ul]
[ul]DDoS-Guard: provides DDoS mitigation to our webserver and they have some pretty responsive support staff, we get a bit back if you use our affiliate link with them.[/ul]
[ul]SauceNAO: They have our entire image archives indexed so you can reverse image search a page to find any series or chapter on the site, we just think they're cool and use their service a lot.[/ul]
[ul]Immortal Taoists: As you all know from the previous ad run, they're a Wuxia-inspired cultivation idle game that a few of us on staff play and like. They were happy with the ad run and accepted the offer to be on our affiliates page. We benefit from people installing the game via the affiliate link just like last time.[/ul]
We'll be accepting and reviewing submissions for new banners if anyone from the community would like to participate! You can choose whether or not you'd like to have your username credited under the banner you design if you submit one. The goal of the designs are to be humorous, similar to the banners we run during april fools' day. Parodies of memes or series using our mascot is encouraged! The first banner was drawn by Teasday, parodying one of the Wikipedia banners from 2010:
To submit a design, feel free to DM it to me directly on MangaDex, or through our Discord.
If you don't want to see the banner, the banner itself can be hidden by closing it as it'll add a "hide_banner" cookie that will persist until you wipe your browser history/cookies.
Infrastructure Changes
We've just recently ordered and are in the process of setting up a significantly beefier server with the intention of replacing the webserver, master database server, and API server with it. The new server will cost us $250 a month, while the webserver is $100/mo, master db server is $90/mo, and API server is $100/mo. Overall, this swap will save us $40 a month while making the site feel noticeably snappier. Currently the new server has only replaced the master db server but the webserver and API are up next. Once the API is on the new server, the cache issues that have been plaguing it will be fixed and Tachiyomi users will suffer no longer.
Following the trend of throwing more expensive servers at stuff, we plan on getting rid of the rest of our database slave servers and replacing it with another beefy $250/mo server. This will add a bit to our monthly server costs but will hopefully solve our database desync problems for good.
MangaDex@Home will soon be used for all image traffic on the site,
The data-saver server and image cache server are no longer with us as we've figured out a way to offload even more stuff onto MangaDex@Home. Unfortunately, the data-saver to MD@H fix will take until next weekend to implement and our contract with the data-saver server ran out today. So for now, data-saver is broken and disabled by default until the change is complete. Getting rid of the data-saver server and the image cache server will save us $190 a month.
In the end, our server costs will look something like
[ul]1 API, master db, webserver - $250
1 slave database server - $250
1 slave database/image archive servers - $140
MangaDex@Home backend - $30
MangaDex@Home metrics - $30
CDN for site assets/DDoS Protection - $180
Reverse proxy - covered by Path
CDN for uploads - covered by MangaDex Network
Total cost: $880/mo (Prev. 920)[/ul]
Quite impressive that our server costs are going to go down during an upgrade. We greatly appreciate anyone who's donated to the site over the past three years, we couldn't have made it this far without you.
P.S. For anyone who's been donating BTC/ETC in the past few months, we're aware that the donation claim process isn't working at the moment (we've received the donations, no worries). Once we finally get through all of the current infrastructure changes and get the site stable, we'll fix the donation claim process. Thank you for your patience!
