I have put together a pictorial of our server history here at TBG. So if the scale of server quality and power runs from say a Google or Yahoo server which is more or less a Saturn V rocket (remember those?) then let's see where we would fall on that scale.

When we launched back in February 2012 we were pretty much working with old fashioned steel wheel skates. You know I actually owned a pair of these when I was kid! Well, no, I didn't own them, I had to share them with my brothers and sisters... anyway enough about what an old fart I have become. These skates represent our original server, basically I controlled 20% of a single slow processor and I ran dozens of different websites all off this one shared server.

Moving forward... the game became popular fairly quickly and only 1 month after launch it was clear that if I didn't do something then the wheels would fall off of the cart, or skates in this case. So in late March 2012 I upgraded to a new server... by comparison it had stats that put the original server to shame. We had one dedicated processor all to ourselves with 100x the bandwidth, 10x the memory, etc. etc. and I thought I was done worrying about server problems for good!

Unfortunately and almost right out of the gate the server had problems. Almost every single month I had to write an apology note to the players because the server was down, or slow, or losing packets. When it was running it ran well, we seldom got up to even 20% of its capacity. But it was a weird server and had what I can only call 'phantom loads' and I had no idea what caused them. This server was in a 'cloud system' and that may or may not be the culprit. At the same time the company from which I hired the server started letting me down big time... they became less responsive to problems just when I needed them most and my frustration grew.

Fast forward to today. I have contracted with a new company to become TBG's (hopefully) permanent home. By comparison this server has 8 processors, 4x the memory, solid state high speed hard drives, and much more. And importantly this is a dedicated box, nothing about this server is shared with anyone else so there can be no 'phantom loads' to slow down the performance. I have also signed a maintenance agreement that gives us 24/7 monitoring and response by technicians at the server farm. We no longer have to wait until I discover the problem, submit a ticket, wait for response, etc. If the thing breaks in the middle of the night then I can stay asleep while somebody who has a lot more experience than I do investigates and fixes the problem. Nice.