Goal reached, upgrades & Discord!

Thanks to reaching the goal, we're currently expanding with a new cluster in North America (all of our other servers are in Europe), adding approx ~10-15Gbps of capacity dedicated just for North American traffic, which will not only increase speeds for NA users, but move traffic from Europe making it faster for everyone. This additional cluster is quite a technical challenge, complicating our setup and infrastructure considerably, but we're making progress :).

Regarding interruptions and slow downs, especially at peak times, these issues are mostly localised to the file cluster, and is IO (HDD) related. To combat this, we're gradually replacing legacy file servers that have mechanical hard drives, with new, SSD based servers. This is providing more consistent speeds, preventing speed drop off, and should also solve the occasional download failures. So far, file servers: 2, 5, 8, 9 and 10 have been replaced. The remaining 10 servers in the file cluster will be gradually replaced over the coming month or so. Additionally, cache15 was replaced yesterday after a motherboard issue.

On top of the above changes, we've made further adjustments to better support download resuming. So far, these changes are only active on the new servers (server2, server5, server8, server9, server10, cache15) but will be rolled out across the rest of the servers soon.

April to May saw an increase in traffic of almost 1PB, with 5.6PB served in a single month. This is an absolutely insane number, I never dreamed nopy would reach this kind of traffic, and without the generosity of our users it wouldn't have been possible <3.

Finally, I've setup a discord. I'm not sure how much this is going to be used, but I think improving communication is always a good thing - https://discord.gg/dzVC8qG