TrueFullstaq and Tweakers: a great match for 23 years
Tweakers hosted by TrueFullstaq with ❤️
You've probably seen the "Hosted by TrueFullstaq" logo on the Tweakers.net website. TrueFullstaq and Tweakers share a rich 23+ year history together. Both are passionate about endless tweaking, optimizing, improving performance, and ultimately helping users and customers move forward.
The beginning of a long partnership
Femme Taken founded Tweakers in 1998, back in the days of dial-up internet. The American internet bubble didn't stop Tweakers from becoming THE leading technology website. By March 2001, the website already had 12 million page views.
They started with shared hosting, but they switched to their own servers at a hosting provider due to rapid growth. The problem was that they could only access their servers one hour per week, which wasn't enough for necessary maintenance. Tweakers posted a message on their front page saying they were looking for a new host
TrueFullstaq took the bait
Tweakers was looking for free hosting and TrueFullstaq was looking for free advertising space - a deal so simple it could be written on a beer coaster. In mid-2001, Tweakers moved to TrueFullstaq.
23 years of growth
Both TrueFullstaq and Tweakers have grown significantly. Since 2024, Tweakers has been hosted in the EUnetworks data center and also in Equinix 8 for redundancy. This has expanded from a couple of servers to 3 complete private cabinets, fully redundantly set up and upgraded from a 1Gbit connection to dozens of Gbit connections.
A successful technical partnership
"The partnership works well, precisely because we rarely need TrueFullstaq," says Kees Hoekzema, System Administrator at Tweakers. "And if there's an issue, it's quickly resolved. I call or chat directly with engineers via IRC."
Tweakers has installed their own network switches where Kees has root access. "If we can't figure something out, I have TrueFullstaq engineers to fall back on."
TrueFullstaq provides power and network connections, including software updates, security measures, and DDoS protection. Hanif Azis, Network Engineer at TrueFullstaq: "Tweakers is a very special client for us. The collaboration is pleasant; they're friendly people with whom we have informal contact. It's like working with friends."
Technical setup in 2024
In 2024, Tweakers runs on a database server and a main cluster of 6 web/application servers with 96 cores and 256 GB of memory, connected with 25 Gbit/s lines. Additionally, they have a development cluster of 3 servers and a Ceph cluster of 6 servers with approximately 160 TB of SSD storage for images, data, files, and more.
The platform has been running in Kubernetes in production since November 2023. "In everything we do, we remain true to our visitors. And they expect us to handle these kinds of things ourselves," Kees says enthusiastically.
