Linux Mint signed a new partnership with eUKhost. The UK hosting company is now the number #1 Linux Mint sponsor and provides our project with a powerful dedicated server for a value of $894/month.
eUKhost becomes the number #1 Linux Mint sponsor
The server is located in Milton Keynes, UK. It runs Debian Lenny in 64-bit with 2 Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 processors (8 CPU cores), 16GB RAM, RAID 10 with 4x300GB 15K SAS hard drives and a bandwidth of 10TB/month.
We moved the forums over the week-end, which were previously hosted in the USA on a costly 4GB RAM Rackspace cloud server. They’re faster than before and the migration is saving money for the distribution. We’re planning to migrate the Community Website next, which is currently hosted in Canada, and possibly the main Website, hosted in Germany. These migrations should improve the response time and performance of our websites while freeing servers for development and testing. The availability of a 64-bit server with as much as 16GB RAM is also a great asset for our project, as it allows us to remotely test or even respin 64-bit ISOs when needed. During the testing process, we’re often faced with ISO files featuring minor faults. The ability to test and re-spin them remotely allows us to quickly fix small issues and submit new ISO images to testing without requiring the intervention of the maintainer himself and the delays associated with uploading these images. Having both the main website and the community website on the same powerful server also allows us to implement closer interactions between profiles, community users and donors. We’ll perform tests and monitoring to ensure that all three websites are faster and more responsive on this new server and if things go according to plan, we’ll end up with a better online experience for users, closer interactions between websites, the possibility of remotely test and re-spin in 64-bit and freed resources for the development team (testing, private repositories and cloud solutions).