EDIT 2025-05-02 11pm EST: We have switched the DNS entry of sarna.net and www.sarna.net to the new server. There were a few bumps over the last hour as we fixed some issues, but the website should be running normally now. Please let us know if there are any ongoing issues by one of the methods below.
Good day everyone!
Sarna.net will be undergoing a migration from our current server to a new, improved, faster, updated, and (hopefully) even more reliable server.
We plan to start the migration today, Friday, May 2nd, 2025 at around 8pm EST. The wiki will be unavailable for editing (and possibly showing only a maintenance message) for up to an hour.
Why? Sarna is currently hosted on a dedicated server in a datacenter in Virginia, US. This server was brought into operation in 2020, and is almost 5 years old! We’re moving to newer hardware that has 4x the CPU, 2x the RAM, 4x faster disks, and 10x+ measured requests per second (RPS) loading Sarna. I’m hoping it will allow us to continue to grow. On top of that, it’s cheaper than the current hardware! So we can scale better if we need.
Note: This is the sixth server hardware upgrade in Sarna’s history, going back 21 years. Yay us for sticking around so long, and being better than ever!
In addition, Sarna’s software stack is being modernized:
- All of the components of Sarna are run in independent Docker containers
- PHP upgrading from 7.2 → 8.1
- MediaWiki upgrading from 1.34 → 1.43 LTS
- All of the MediaWiki extensions have been updated
This hardware migration + software stack upgrade has required preparation, development and testing for several months, and we’ve been fixing many issues we’ve found along the way. As of right now, there are no known significant issues blocking the migration, so we’re going to proceed.
However, migrations are never perfect and we may have missed some scenarios. If you encounter any issues after the migration, you can do any of these:
- Create an issue in the Sarna Github Issue Tracker
- Start a discussion in the Sarna 2025 Upgrades thread in the Sarna Discord.
- Send Nic a message
We’ll be posting progress updates in the the Sarna Discord and Bluesky. I’ll amend this post with updates after the migration is completed as well.
Wish us luck!
Hopefully you’ll dial back the amount of intrusive, unskippable ads.
Good luck on the migration!
If you have a wiki account, you can completely disable the ads in your account settings.
No ads should be unskippable; if you find any, please take a screenshot and connect with us.
You can turn off ads permanently here: https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Information:FAQ/Supporting#How_can_I_not_see_the_ads.3F