Slower web service

Posted on Friday 27 April 2007, at 13:47 UTC

Hi folks!

We apologize for the slow down of the web service, caused by the death of a web server's hard drive.We won't be able to physically reach the server before Wednesday... updates coming soon ;)

As usual, hardware donations are welcome!

We will continue to provide PHP :-)

Posted on Monday 2 April 2007

Of course, it was our annual april fool :) A small amount of people get fooled by our previous email : we had some interresting replies :)

Anyway, you should know that the electricity used to generate dynamic webpages is a real issue, and we are even not including all the power burnt to fight the spam.

You should also know that the amount of CPU used on TuxFamily to deliver dynamic webpages raises day after day. A few months ago, we had to add a web server to the pool. If the load continue to increase at the actual rate, we will have to add one or two additional servers before the end of the year.

So, if you have some unused hardware (dual PIII, single PIV or even more) or something that is in our wanted list, feel free to ship it to our headquarters, we do know how to use it in an intelligent way ;) If you don't have available hardware but some money, you may also help us by making a small donation. It will help us to continue providing a sufficiently fast and reliable hosting to more and more projects !

In any case, thank you for trusting TuxFamily, thanks, really ! :)

have a nice April 2nd !

The admin's

TuxFamily chooses the way of ecology: the end of PHP

Posted on Sunday 1 April 2007

Informed about all the electricity used by a server and aware of all the environmental issues that are caused by the shameless waste of this resource, we started, a few months ago, a detailed analysis of our platform in order to find and fight our potential points of strong electric consumption. The result of this study confirmed our expectations : 70% of the electric power is used by the generation of dynamic Web pages (including SQL servers). We needed to take an ecological decision! During several months we were looking for a solution, but without success. We planned to lower a bit the load of web servers by adding restrictions through the robots.txt file to all those search engines that are making a lot of queries on the servers. (but is it really read by all search engines ?).

The only solution we can think of is to stop providing a dynamic Web pages service. We met this day in order to decide the fate of the PHP, our decision is taken, we give up the PHP.

However, we are sure that you will transform your website into a static version, it will be thus much faster and it will not depend any more on a SQL server ! Moreover we will soon open a new service allowing you to have a semi-dynamic website by generating the pages of your website each night.

The date of abandonment was fixed at May 1, 2007, but can still be modified depending on the number of still in use dynamic websites. In any case, a hard and final dead line is fixed at September 1, 2007.