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Making Leadwerks.com More Scalable


Josh

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Our website stores a lot of user generated content in the forum of images and attachments.  Before Leadwerks Game Engine was on Steam the demands were even higher, since we had our own downloads and gallery sections that stored data on our server.  Since the implementation of Steam screenshots and Workshop a lot of that has been offloaded onto the Steam servers, relieving our server from some of the data storage and transfer costs.  (If you're interested, all our old content is archived on Google drive here.)

Currently our website weighs in at about 35 GB of data.  This is backed up online daily, and offline about once a month.  The entire server is usually burned onto a Blu-Ray disc and saved away.  The time and storage space this takes is considerable, and as the site keeps growing this approach will not be sustainable.

Screen Shot 2017-10-14 at 5.29.36 PM.png

Amazon S3 allows you to store files in the cloud with an API to write and save files, at a cost of $0.023 (that's 2.3 cents) per GB per month.  I've hooked into the service to offload all user attachments, images, and profile pictures onto Amazon's servers.  This leaves our core site data at an easily manageable 2.5 GB, which I can easily burn onto a DVD.

Now that all user data is stored in the AWS system for dirt cheap prices, we can easily grow the amount of content on our site without it impacting the site responsiveness, backup time, or having much impact on operating costs.  Stay tuned and I will tell you how we are going to use this for game development.

 

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If you hosted with AWS as well, you could clone the whole server image with the click of a button.

AWS is expensive though IMO.

I have my stuff hosted with Linode. 2 VMs. 1 for the websites, the other for the game server.


If you really wanted to get crazy, you could setup hosting in two different data centers having your database replicated between them. Then if something goes down you can just switch DNS over to the 2nd data center.

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Actually, MartyJ is correct. 

You can actually host from an S3 Bucket. I was hosting our company divisions webpage from my AWS page. 

It may save you a lot of hassle Dr Josh. 


Expensive on the other hand? I'm not sure about, then again, I am using S3 as my dropbox and am charged about $2 a month for 120GB of storage. 

But, my EC2 acct, yes, that gets expensive. I was hosting DCS World Flight Sim mmultiplayer games from my EC2 so my russian and french freinds could join. We had great up/downstream, but it cost about 12 bucks a day on thier M class. 
 

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On ‎10‎/‎27‎/‎2017 at 3:23 PM, GSFC_1 said:

Actually, MartyJ is correct. 

You can actually host from an S3 Bucket. I was hosting our company divisions webpage from my AWS page. 

It may save you a lot of hassle Dr Josh. 


Expensive on the other hand? I'm not sure about, then again, I am using S3 as my dropbox and am charged about $2 a month for 120GB of storage. 

But, my EC2 acct, yes, that gets expensive. I was hosting DCS World Flight Sim mmultiplayer games from my EC2 so my russian and french freinds could join. We had great up/downstream, but it cost about 12 bucks a day on thier M class. 
 

I think you can only host a static website from an S3 bucket, so no scripts and no databases.

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