So after we’ve extended the virtual cloud server twice, we’re at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news… we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
So I think this is what people have meant by vertical vs horizontal scaling in all these prior threads about the servers. Right now they are vertical scaling only, which means they can only run it on one server. Lemmy seemingly currently struggles with horizontal scaling, or as it is more widely known, load balancing between multiple servers.
I believe this is on the devs to do list(someone please do correct me if I am wrong), and is being bumped up to a much higher priority considering the massive influx of users to the lemmyverse.