#32090: Blog status and where to go -------------------------------------------------+--------------------- Reporter: hiro | Owner: tpa Type: defect | Status: new Priority: Medium | Milestone: Component: Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team | Version: Severity: Normal | Resolution: Keywords: | Actual Points: Parent ID: | Points: Reviewer: | Sponsor: -------------------------------------------------+---------------------
Comment (by anarcat): Here's a summary of our status with the blog, a month after the cache went online. Two main problems were identified with the blog: 1. Broken templates and long-term web development goals 2. Cost overrun issues TL;DR: 1. fix templates in-house or Giant Rabbit, switch to static site generator (Lektor?) and external commenting system (Discourse?) in the mid-long term 2. cost overruns back under control (~500$?), but incomprehensible billing makes this possibly uncertain, need to double-check = Broken templates and web development Ever since some change happened on the blog (an upgrade?), HTML templates were broken, which is particularly visible in the comments section. Those are not formatted properly and we want those fixed. We considered various providers to outsource this consulting to and, coincidentally, consider moving our hosting elsewhere. We had a quote from Koumbit.org which was privately discussed. For now, we will try to fix the blog where it is in the meantime, maybe with the help of an existing Drupal provider (Giant Rabbit) instead of starting a new business relationship. Something that we should consider is that fixing the template might be expensive. Hiro is willing to make another try adapting our styleguide to an updated bootstrap template. In the long term, we want to move away from Drupal, towards a static site generator for the content and something like Discourse for the comments in the backend. The latter could be reused for other projects inside Tor, particularly the support and community teams, among others. It was also considered as an option for easier user onboarding for bug reporting when compared to GitLab. The static site generator could be one we area already using, like Lektor. This still has to be discussed further. We might achieve the same level of WYSIWYG with a static site generator, without the time and economical investment of running a giant framework like drupal. = Cost issues The other problem that was identified in October was the cost overrun issues. Around August or September, we passed the 300k visits per month mark, which bumped us in another price range with Pantheon (~1k$/mth). Their [https://pantheon.io/pricing-comparison pricing plan] seem to go as follows, in terms of visits/month vs cost/month: * small, 25k: 175$ * medium, 50k: 300$ * large, 150k: 600$ * extra-large, 300k: 1000$ (I'm ignoring the "basic" 50$/mth package because I'm going under the assertion that's not accessible for us, because it's a high traffic site.) Before the traffic bumps happened, we were billed 500$/mth for the site, presumably a prefered rate over the official 600$/mth rate. We were bumped from the "large" to the "extra-large" package first on september 27th, then again on october 29th. Their billing system is ... a bit opaque to me, but it seems we are now billed 500$/mth again. I honestly can't figure out *what* is going on with the billing at this point, honestly. I would love if Jon or someone else could go over those invoices and figure it out. But my theory right now is the caching system did its job and brought us back to a "pre-crisis" level of billing, that is, the "large" billing package. Indeed, that is what the "billing" section of the Pantheon dashboard says. There's also this message in the "Workflow section: > Changed site plan to "plan-performance_large-preferred-monthly-1" > [matt's email address at panthon] > Finished 40 minutes ago So maybe we got someone at Pantheon to intervene for us? We can clearly see a drop in the traffic on the backend in the Pantheon stats: [[Image(snap-2019.12.09-11.28.37.png, 700)]] * October: 435k visits, 3.1M pages served * November: 165k visits, 1M pages served That's a 63% drop in visits and 68% drop in page served. It could still get slightly better in December, as out hit ratio is actually better than this, at 88%: [[Image(snap-2019.12.09-11.30.12.png, 700)]] The reason those ratios don't correspond exactly to each other is we have different ways to count those statistics. Pantheon uses "visits" and "pages", we use "hits". The distinction is that a "visitor" can hit multiple "pages" in one "visit", and a page is made of multiple "hits". So while we may keep many hits from going to the backend, we may not keep as many "pages" as we want going there. I suspect it would be very hard to remove the other 115k visits per month to get down to the medium package, and I have not made more efforts to do so. Also, as far as I can tell, this traffic hitting our own TPA infrastructure is not affecting us in any significant way, neither in terms of cost (traffic is not large enough to change billing significantly) or performance (load is not big enough to affect the server's overall performance). So I consider the "cost" crisis to be over, but there might be more tricks we could do to bring the hit ratio down. At this point, I consider the cost tradeoff to not be worth it, however, as long as Pantheon doesn't bump us back to the "extra large" cost grid. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32090#comment:6> Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/> The Tor Project: anonymity online
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