Tabletop TogetherIf you tried to visit Tabletop Together recently and found the lights off, don't worry — we weren't raptured, rage-quit, or eaten by a grue. We were doing something far more dangerous: upgrading the servers.
The site is back, it's faster, and it's now running on hardware that doesn't double as furniture. Here's the story.
Humble Beginnings (a.k.a. The Desktop Era)
Every campaign starts at level 1, and so did we. For the longest time, all of Tabletop Together ran on a single home desktop computer running Proxmox. One machine. Sitting there. Humming. Handling every page load, every post, every die roll of traffic, like a level 1 fighter guarding an entire kingdom with a wooden shield and a positive attitude.
And honestly? It did great. That little box tanked more than it had any right to. But every session has that moment when the party looks at their gear and admits it: we cannot fight the next boss with this loadout.
The Shopping Spree (Roll for Loot)
So we planned a proper upgrade — the infrastructure equivalent of trading your starting equipment for the good stuff in the back of the shop that the merchant only shows serious customers:
Dell PowerEdge servers — actual, honest-to-goodness enterprise hardware. The kind with sliding rails and more fans than a convention hall.
A real server rack to put them in, because enterprise servers do not appreciate being stacked on a bookshelf next to your painted miniatures. (We asked. They were firm about it.)
New networking gear throughout, so the bits can travel in style.
Redundant clusters — if one server goes down mid-session, another one picks up the dice and keeps playing. No more single point of failure. The kingdom now has two guards, and they've both got proper armor.
High-speed backend networks — dedicated fast lanes just for the servers to talk to storage and each other, so the heavy lifting happens behind the scenes without slowing down your page loads.
The Downtime (Every Campaign Has a Long Rest)
Here's the thing about swapping out the ground beneath a website's feet: you can't do it while the website is standing on it. So we took the site offline for several hours while we made the move.
To everyone who hit refresh during the outage: we felt every one of those refreshes, spiritually. Migrations are the tabletop equivalent of moving your entire campaign — maps, minis, that one janky homebrew rules document — to a new table across town, in one trip, in the rain. There were cables. There were so many cables. There may have been a moment where a firewall and a network configuration disagreed about the meaning of the word "allow." Words were exchanged. We won. Eventually.
New Stats, Who Dis?
The upgrade is complete, and the character sheet speaks for itself:
Faster: more horsepower and quicker networking from front to back.
Tougher: redundant clustering means hardware failures get shrugged off instead of taking the site down.
Ready to grow: we finally have the room — in the rack and on the servers — to build the things we've been wanting to build.
The best part is what you won't notice. No dramatic slowdowns when things get busy. No mysterious outages because one lonely desktop decided it had rolled its last initiative. Just the site, up, doing its job, while the new hardware quietly hums away in a rack like it was born for this. (It was. Literally. That's the whole point of enterprise hardware.)
Thanks for Your Patience
Seriously — thank you for bearing with the downtime, and for being the reason it's worth building any of this. The desktop that carried us this far has earned its retirement; the new gear has a lot to live up to.
Now if you'll excuse us, we have several hundred cable ties to pretend we're going to organize.
See you at the table, — Tabletop Together