The TrueToad website has been running continuously for over 10 years as of August 2020. During these ten years, hundreds of articles were added with hundreds of software upgrades and patches applied to keep the site secure and running, like piling on layer after layer. Eventually, I had to face the fact, I needed a new, updated, clean server environment. Here we are.
This August marks TrueToad's 10th year anniversary year. I decided it was time to migrate to a more powerful server with more memory and improved security features with a fresh software install across the board. Anyone who manages web services knows the possibilities of a worst-case scenario - complete data loss. With my site backups ready, the worst would be me "hand jamming" hundreds of Reviews and Blog Entries back into place.
- To put things in perspective the cost to move and update TrueToad website was over $2,500 USD, above the operating cost up to August not including domain and SSL registration. Keep in mind TrueToad is a free service offered to you at no cost, your contributions are not required, you are not required to watch needless ads, unlike YouTube.
What changed in the Ten Years: First, by moving to a brand new current Operating System server and leaving all the old 10-year-old junk behind the content is being delivered two-fold faster to your browser. The Server move came at a significant cost and personal effort and stress. You may have noticed the TrueToad site was not available for a few hours or occasionally threw errors while I was busy importing/re-adding content. In the image below, average page rendering before the upgrade was a mere 30, now it is pegging 90 in Google Analytics, and I am still working on improvements.
The second change was streamlining Javascript and CSS to ensure that making it look "pretty" does not drag down the content delivery performance. This is an ongoing task.
Scrupulous People: For some reason, there are people who attempt to compromise the site through various tactics. I am not sure what the benefit for these scrupulous people are since this site does not collect email addresses or personal information of any kind. There are no secret treasures on this website. To stay vigilant I countered their challenge of scrupulous people by routing site requests through a cloud service provider who provides tools to block, challenge, or re-direct attempts on the site - the cloud is a good thing. As an example, I had a denial of service attempt to flood the website with many invalid URLs resulting in 404 pages not found, occurring every second or two. Meaning performance drops and you the legitimate user suffer from it in the end. This attack was blocked like many other individuals.
As a second security safeguard, I employed a third party company to perform daily scans on the website with a report of changes, malware, additions, or other red flags.
I hope you enjoy the updates and are confident this site is reliable, has integrity, and has earned your confidence.
Thanks,
TrueToad