I have been thinking about all this, and over the past week have been implementing what I believe I am now happy with. I have several servers, all doing different things, though in essence I can bring them all into one, partition where necessary site resources, and have done just that. Right now, this site sits all by itself on a server as its some what busy, so its best that way. That was 8 odd years ago, where NGINX was kicking butt, yet now Apache is far better for dynamic content, which this site very much is. So time to move back to Apache web server.
Getting older, doing different things in life, I want to spend less time on servers and more time camping and fishing, so I have vastly simplified everything for myself behind the scenes, I am shifting from multiple servers to one, located in Sydney. A large-ish server (larger than this sites), but I can quickly scale it as I need, isolate resources and do as I need.
Currently this server is in NYC, I was going to move it central to Dallas, but with all the improvements and performance options available to me via Cloudflare as the DNS and CDN of all my sites, where I host it really matters little now, as all the static content is stored locally in a major city close to you. Simply, every location listed at
Cloudflare Status holds my sites static content. Paid service, but superior for end-user performance. All that a person is actually waiting to load from the servers location, is the text on the page, which is milliseconds to achieve. All the big stuff that doesn't change on a page, comes from that nearest city to you, uniquely.
So... its running, it is hosting a whole bunch of business sites and things I have interest in and/or doing for people, and I will slot this site onto that server. This makes my life and the upkeep of this site, infinitely easier in the coming years with a single system that I can upgrade at the touch of a button with little risk. That's what backups are for if shit goes wrong. Very easy though for me.
Site updates can still be a pain in the bum, but servers will no longer be an issue and simplified.
This approach costs a little more annually as I am throwing more into paid CDN services for localised performance, but worth it. The site will actually have more processing power now, RAM and so forth. Bigger system, but worth it overall. I have all my other sites running on the new server and I can't see any issue with the available resources, being more than I currently have... so the site should perform fine. If needed, like said, I can scale the server as needed (more RAM, CPU, storage, etc, instantly) with maybe a few minute downtime for the server to reboot with its new specs.
Having got this out of the way... I'm going to start looking at the sites upgrade over the next month or two, playing around with things to improve the site, simplify where possible, etc. I may get this site onto the new server as is... maybe... but that will still be next year, not this year.
Progress.
