You can find the basic information about this in the news post here. This post is going to dive a little bit deeper into what we're planning on doing, as well as the situation that we've got ourselves in.

TLDR We made a choice to spend more money now in order to move and provide a better experience for everyone, instead of waiting for our contract with a vendor to be completed.

We're moving to Amazon Aurora which will work well with our existing Amazon services.

Contracts! I've touched on this a little bit in the past, but a few years ago we signed a contract with a database vendor when we were still growing quickly and didn't have the workforce to manage our own database.

The product that we purchased is a custom database on top of servers that we also paid for, that were physical and entirely ours. Last year the product changed to an entirely cloud-based solution, which required us moving our database into the cloud.

We're now more than a year in, and have made changes to the site that have pushed it to be faster and better operated from the back end but are still facing 504/502 errors from that move. Unfortunately, we are still under contract with this vendor for a few more months, and our plan was to wait it out so that we didn't spend a ton of money on something we weren't using.

HOWEVER based on feedback and a mutual frustration on our end, we're moving our database to Amazon RDS sooner than we anticipated. Amazon Aurora is an outstanding service that is tested against loads much larger than Subeta, and runs on servers specifically targeted for databases. It's also a more efficient use of funds for the power behind it, and scales automatically depending on the use case of the site.

Amazon Aurora

So, what made us choose Amazon Aurora? There were a few key things that made this the easiest choice.

1. Hosted on RDS, which is the Amazon database architecture. All of our webservers are also within the Amazon network, which means immediate access on a private network so no data has to be exposed to the outside world.
2. Scalable. This was the promise of our current vendor, but the key here is that we can scale up AND down, so if Subeta is having a slower month (typically in the summer) we can cut back the database and save resources for when we have a lot of users online (morostide, etc).
3. Availability. We can have our database hosted in multiple locations, the same as our web servers, which provides faster access to the data.
4. Backups. Right now we have backups of our database for the last 7 days, a week, and one that is a month back. With amazon we can put more backups into their "glacier" service for much, much cheaper, and ensure that we have good backups going back as far as we need.
5. Frequent Updates. The vendor that we're using now has us on MySQL 5.1. Amazon uses at least MySQL 5.6 and is moving to 5.7 in the near term. This is important to access to the newest features of the database language, but also for speed and security improvements. A simple example of this is the unicode problem we've been having on pet pages and names, this is completely resolved in MySQL 5.5 but we had to make various hacks to get it to work on Subeta with 5.1.
6. NO LOCK IN. This is key and an obvious learning of the situation that we are in now. If at any time we aren't happy with Aurora, we can leave. ?

Grats on the move!

Thank you so much for the explanation and the heads up. Again, fingers crossed for a smooth transition and hopefully less frayed nerves in the future all around~

Great information. Looking forward to the new database. Thanks, Keith.

Thanks for the awesome explanation! I hope things go smoothly :)

Hope this is not going to give you guys a lot of hard time! Thanks for the info

Thank you for the update and for working so hard to improve the site!! ❤️❤️❤️

Thank you again for the update! c: I hope the transition goes smoothly!

neato. Glad we are moving forward. That's always a good thing. ^_^

Thank you for the extra information.

Thanks for the update maybe now the people saying you are just pocketing our money and doing nothing will shut up

Thank you for the update and all the work.

Thank you for telling us and being transparent about the whole thing. I really appreciate. I hope the move goes smoothly.

Sounds great, thanks for the info! And life is all about learning experiences, some good, some not so much. ;)

I actually didn't know that there was a contract involved with the current service that was used. It makes the current situation more understandable (still frustrating though). Contracts with a required time are awful.

Thank you for deciding to move forward anyway and move on to Aurora. I'm excited to see how this turns out!

I'm glad to hear it, and I look forward to the move.

Thank you for an update that I could surprisingly understand. :)

Thanks for the explanation of everything, I hope the transition goes well.

Hopefully this will help out with the errors and restore confidence in the site. <3

Wow..thank you so much for all the background information. It sounds like things will get much better. I too am hoping that the transition goes very smooth.

Thanks for the updates!!