Part of the reason for trouble yesterday. I'm pretty sure that my home IP was flagged, which meant it was challenging to get to the console for a while.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/22/aws_dns_ddos/

Seems healthier now.

Note that I have almost completed a completely new server build (last build was 11 years ago!). I'll be switching to that this weekend.

This will reduce cost significantly.

I'm also switching to a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution. This means that many pages will be served nearest your geolocation, which should increase speed. Part of the challenge with this is tweaking the cache behaviors. If you're seeing odd behavior with what's marked as new, etc., this has to do with the need for tweaking. Please report any observations on this thread.

As part of this CDN change, I'll be blocking the onslaught of bots (WAF), which is negatively impacting performance and driving up cost. There are some very rude bots just hammering the site.

Finally, I aim to do some refactoring. Some of my coding ideas seem very naive to me now. I'll tweak this site, but intend to build a whole new forum system over time that I'll test using brickboard data (will have an alternate address). I'm sure that I could build a massively scalable forum system with the many new options available now. What becomes of that, we'll see.

-Jarrod