FlyingRagnar

Wow, I need to visit the Den more often. I totally missed this thread from over the summer. After the Nintendo Direct which announced both the Hero being added to Smash, as well as Dragon Quest XI on the Switch, the wiki saw DOUBLE the normal amount of traffic for about the next month. It was not above and beyond what the current server can handle (it was close!) but it mostly caused issues because the site has rarely had to deal with "spikes" in popularity. And just to share some technical info, the wiki runs using a MySQL database. This database is backed up daily on the site, and backups are kept for daily, weekly, and monthly intervals. This covers everything but the images/files uploaded. So if the database were to crash, or what has happened more often, a table gets corrupted somehow, there are plenty of backups. So far, I have never had to use one and have been able to resolve the issues by fixing whatever the problem is. As for the images/files, the entire site is also backed up daily, and daily, weekly, monthly backups are kept. So we should be well covered in the event of any major issues. At some point in the future, I will have to see if I could post a full backup somewhere on the web if there is interest in anyone having a personal backup.

Hey all, the wiki issue which was preventing logins has been resolved. Sorry for the downtime. Thanks to those of you who messaged me and posted on here. Please continue to do so in the future, as I don't have eyes on the site at all times.

I should also mention, that while 9.3GB is the current "base" size for the whole wiki, the size on the server will grow to be much larger (probably by 5-6GB). This is because of how MediaWiki does thumbnail images. While migrating the site, I did not port over the current thumbnails, instead the wiki creates them automatically as images are viewed in a context where a thumbnail is needed. So over the next couple months, they will be regenerated and cause the overall size of the site to increase quite a bit.

The wiki does somewhere between 100-200GB of transfer per month. On the new host, we have 1000GB per month, so that will be no problem at all. The bigger concern is disk space. For some reason, this host (Linode) is pretty stingy when it comes to disk space. We are on the cheapest plan, which provides only 20GB of disk space. The total size of the site is currently 9.3GB. If that ever gets too large, I will upgrade to the next tier size. Most of the size is images, which is not suprising. I'm running MediaWiki with a MySQL backend for the database. The database size is around 600MB. I'm doing a much better jobs with backups this time around. I'm paying for the host to do routine backups (nightly, weekly, monthly). I've also setup the database to export a backup every night to a file. This is a big improvement over the previous host where backups were not done on a routine basis. It comes out to about $7 per month, which is pretty comparable to what I was paying on the previous host. However, I now have full control over the server to do upgrades, installs, etc.

The move to a new host has been a success. The wiki also now supports SSL encryption.

I'm planning to move the Dragon Quest wiki to a new host later this month. This should not affect any of the content or users. The site will be unavailable for a day or two during the upgrade, assuming everything goes according to plan.

Check it out. The author does some pretty crazy glitching.

I was stunned when I watched the Nintendo Direct. I was definitely a naysayer at this point, I didn't think it would happen. There was such a lack of momentum for the series. Seems like this must have been in the works prior to the release of Dragon Quest Heroes? I remember some folks saying they thought it might live or die based on the sales of that game.

Winning an island sounds like something my 3 year old would suggest as a contest reward. I wasn't planning on getting Just Cause 3, but because of the chance of an island...I'll be first in line.

Yet another Square Enix anticipointment day.

They are also a rare drop from a Blue Beak. I forget how rare, but I don't think it was a very good chance...

I'm happy to announce that after a many year hiatus, I am once again uploading high quality Dragon Quest videos to YouTube. I'm working on 2 projects simultaneously. The first is a continuation of my Dragon Quest IX series of videos. I'm starting right where I left off...at the Tower of Trades and opening up Alltrades Abbey. The first video will be #39 in the series and go from there. Also, I'm uploading high quality re-encodes of my Dragon Quest IV NES videos. My process for creating the videos has improved a lot since I originally uploaded them, PLUS YouTube now supports 60 FPS videos. This is significant for the NES Dragon Quest games because they all originally displayed in 60 FPS. By only using 30 FPS, spell animations and other "flashing" type visualizations look bad. The new Dragon Quest IX videos will also support 60 FPS for 720p and 1080p playback.

...and now we can wait years and years until the VII remake gets released.

I wish it was a remake of VI instead of VII, or at least do VI first, then VII.

I can. Thanks for sharing!