The Client

Futility Closet exists as a place to give people a break from the dullness of work, by providing puzzles, anecdotes, and more. They also publish a weekly podcast highlighting “forgotten stories from the pages of history,” along with story updates and lateral thinking puzzles.

The Problem

The site was running on a shared host, but was growing too large for that platform. The site had also suffered regular security breaches.

The Solution

We architected an environment that would support a Reddit or Slashdot deluge of requests, and moved the site to an implementation of that environment. We continue to maintain that environment and back up data and files for the over 10,000 posts.

In mid-2010, we obtained a backup of the previous site, and looked through it to ensure that none of the breaches had made any permanent changes to the site's structure and data. We also locked down the new server (hosted on Rackspace Cloud) to only required protocols, training the client on SSH so that they could have access. We also stood up nginx as the front-end server, boosting performance significantly while requiring a much smaller server.

In 2015, we began hosting Futility Closet (using Digital Ocean).