Hosting and Configuring the jQuery Servers

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The other day, we posted about our new content workflow, but we didn’t get into how all that content is actually served. Believe it or not, jQuery doesn’t just run on jQuery.

The servers

The servers themselves are hosted at Media Temple. We have been using their VPS services for many years to host all the things we need to host, of which there are a surprising number. We use over a dozen different servers (of various sizes) hosting everything in the jQuery network including many different web sites, applications and services vital to the community and development team. The reliability of the Media Temple VPS services and network for our infrastructure has been fantastic.

The setup

We couldn’t manage all of the servers without Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that makes it really easy to express server configuration in a simple scripting language. Tasks like adding a domain to the Nginx configuration can be annoying, and hard to track changes using conventional methods. Using Puppet lets us store all the server configuration needed in a git repository, and deploy new machines very easily.

Another product that really shines in our setup is Nginx. Nginx is an open source web server focused on delivering the best performance possible. On our busiest Media Temple Dedicated Virtual server around peak times, Nginx handles about 300 HTTP requests per second, of which about 30 are serving pages from WordPress via php-fpm. Nginx’s built in fastcgi_cache handles a lot of that load, and more like 2 or 3 requests per second actually make it to PHP.

Thanks for the support!

Keeping a network of servers running to support a community as large as jQuery’s is a big job. To help ensure everything runs smoothly, we rely on jQuery Infrastructure team members Adam Ulvi and Ryan Neufeld, and for server and network-related issues we count on prompt and helpful support from the Media Temple team.

To celebrate their 7 years of serving the jQuery community, Media Temple is extending a special offer on their VPS and Grid Hosting. For the next 5 days, get 50% off an annual purchase of a Grid or VPS (up to level 3) service with the code LovejQuery50.

Speaking of support, if you need any support with jQuery, or the related web sites and services, check out one of our IRC channels on freenode.

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