The Mana World is a large project, and requires several hosting services. From Jan 2006 (not exactly sure) until May 2009, mostly everything was hosted on platinum, provided by Platyna. Since then, she has decided that she no longer wanted to host us. We are now planning on moving services to other hosts. A possible distribution would be as follows:

www.themanaworld.org                    b_lindeijer

forums.themanaworld.org  (phpBB3)       trapdoor
wiki.themanaworld.org    (MediaWiki)    trapdoor
server.themanaworld.org  (eAthena)      trapdoor
testing.themanaworld.org (eAthena)      trapdoor

mantis.themanaworld.org  (Mantis)       the-me or SourceForge

updates.themanaworld.org (update host)  AnonDuck

Git repositories                        gitorious.org

The idea of spreading things out is to avoid any single point of failure. I intend to host the main website at nearlyfreespeech.net, for maximum uptime.

• trapdoor has a fast dedicated server that should work fine for the forums, wiki and bug tracker.
• AnonDuck provides a Xen-based virtual machine, which is relatively easy to move when necessary.
• the-me has access to a server that could run one of our web services

In the future we will probably also set up tmwweb somewhere.

Comments welcome. --Bjørn 12:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Privacy Concerns

Quiche_on_a_leach pointed out the privacy issues of this hosting transfer in this forum thread. The account&passwords file of eAthena has passwords in clear text, for example.

Anonymizing the password list

A possible solution would be to use a script to convert all passwords in the database to their SHA hashes and then pass the file to the new hoster. Then we could either provide a web-based applet where every user can provide his old password to reset the password of the account or we could add the SHA password encryption to eAthena. The latter solution would be easier for the user and also improve the users privacy in the long run.

Backups

To decrease vulnerability to the sudden loss of one hoster I would recommend that daily updates of every hosted service are stored on the other servers when possible. That way it should be easy to transfer a service temporarily to another hoster without complete loss of data (just remember the time when the forum and the wiki went down and noone knew what happened or if there were any backups).