New web server

Since that unfortunate incident last summer when the contract for the web server I'd been using was cancelled I've been running this site on an EC2 micro instance. This is great and all, but micro instances aren't all that fast and they have very limited CPU (at least, for anything other than in short bursts). Windows, SQL Express, and everything else that this has been using have a lot of overhead and the micro instance has been somewhat slow.

Actually, that's an understatement. It's been pretty much unusably slow :(

Today though I've finally managed to get the new web server up and running with (at least most of) the old content. Some things don't work — user logins, the forums/threads, the postcode pages and a couple of other minor things. The new server software also doesn't have any content authoring capability, but I can solve that by simply running a version of the old software in a virtual machine.

There are some parts that I've not brought across yet, those will give “Service Unavailable” for now. I'm sure that I've forgotten redirects and other such things. I'll get all of this stuff fixed up over the coming months (honest).

This new version is totally written in C++ using Fost 4. Most of the actual content is rendered by the old software and written as files on disk. The site chrome is wrapped around this and knowledge about the site structure is in a JSON database.

I'll write up more details about how all of this actually works, but for now I'm just going to be happy if this new software is a lot more stable and a lot faster than the old…