- Beardie name(s)
- Cailyth, Pinky, & Brain
Hey all,
I just wanted to post a heads up to everyone. As some have noted, the site becomes temporarily unavailable or seems very slow.
The problem is that we're experiencing a spike in visitors. We do every year at this time. It generally tapers off after January. However, I was noticing that we have been pushing the load limits back in September and October as well. As such, I plan to upgrade the site to a newer and bigger server so we can accommodate the increase in visitors. We've been steadily increasing in visitors over time, and seem to have now gotten to a point that we need to upgrade again.
In the last 10+ years, we've probably gone through 5-6 upgrades. Originally, the site was run from a spare computer out of my house (probably the first 4 years) and had at least one hardware upgrade during that time. Then we upgraded to a hosted service as my DSL connection just wasn't fast enough to keep up. Then, after complaints from the hosting company that we were consuming too much resources for a shared hosting account, we upgraded to a virtual server account. And when that wasn't enough, we upgraded to this dedicated server (about 2+ years ago, I think). Well... now it's time to upgrade again! It will still be a dedicated servre, but one with a bit more CPU and a bunch more memory (the real limit to the server currently).
It will likely be 1-2 months before the upgrade is ready. First, I need to make sure I will have the time to do the setup of the new server (installing all the software, etc.), and then get it all done. The final step will be a final data migration to get the latest copy of the database, in which time the website will be offline for a few hours (at least). This will get done during a low peak time (generally Saturday evenings).
Anyway... please bear with us during these times of growing pains. As some long-time members can attest, whenerver we upgrade things seem nice and snappy again.
I just wanted to post a heads up to everyone. As some have noted, the site becomes temporarily unavailable or seems very slow.
The problem is that we're experiencing a spike in visitors. We do every year at this time. It generally tapers off after January. However, I was noticing that we have been pushing the load limits back in September and October as well. As such, I plan to upgrade the site to a newer and bigger server so we can accommodate the increase in visitors. We've been steadily increasing in visitors over time, and seem to have now gotten to a point that we need to upgrade again.
In the last 10+ years, we've probably gone through 5-6 upgrades. Originally, the site was run from a spare computer out of my house (probably the first 4 years) and had at least one hardware upgrade during that time. Then we upgraded to a hosted service as my DSL connection just wasn't fast enough to keep up. Then, after complaints from the hosting company that we were consuming too much resources for a shared hosting account, we upgraded to a virtual server account. And when that wasn't enough, we upgraded to this dedicated server (about 2+ years ago, I think). Well... now it's time to upgrade again! It will still be a dedicated servre, but one with a bit more CPU and a bunch more memory (the real limit to the server currently).
It will likely be 1-2 months before the upgrade is ready. First, I need to make sure I will have the time to do the setup of the new server (installing all the software, etc.), and then get it all done. The final step will be a final data migration to get the latest copy of the database, in which time the website will be offline for a few hours (at least). This will get done during a low peak time (generally Saturday evenings).
Anyway... please bear with us during these times of growing pains. As some long-time members can attest, whenerver we upgrade things seem nice and snappy again.
