Site Maintenance and Upgrade, Wednesday 1/30, evening

[bikehikeskifish]

Hello VFTTers,

It is almost one year since we migrated the site to vftt.org. For the first year, we agreed to leave it running on the least-expensive plan, a fully-shared solution. On Wednesday evening, I plan to take advantage of a free one-week trial of a better plan, where we get our own VPS (Virtual Private Server). The migration is supposed to be automatic, with only a brief period of down time during the actual migration (time varies, based on how much data is to be migrated, etc.) I plan to 'push the button' some time tomorrow evening, probably around 9PM. There may be some interruption in service at this time (due to DNS changes). I am not migrating the database to its own server (yet) and so it should not require any additional tweaking to just keep on going.

Tim

 

[RollingRock]

Tim...thanks for all you do!

 

[The Unstrung Harp]

Yup, thanks Tim!!

 

[Stash]

Very good stuff from a green perspective. With virtualization you can consolidate 2 to 20, sometimes more physical servers onto a single piece of hardware the same size as the original. Huge energy savings with the resulting reduction of impact on the environment.

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Very good stuff from a green perspective. With virtualization you can consolidate 2 to 20, sometimes more physical servers onto a single piece of hardware the same size as the original. Huge energy savings with the resulting reduction of impact on the environment.

Yes and no... we are on a shared server already, not a private, bare-metal server.

Tim

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Migration is in progress.

The database is not changing, so posts, passwords, PMs, etc., should be preserved.
The software, attachments, and avatars are migrating from the shared web server to the VPS web server, thus I suspect if you change either, you risk losing that change.

The entire process is described as seamless and automatic, except there is a brief hiccup when the migration is complete (should be overnight) and possibly as the DNS changes make their way across the internet.

Tim

 

[bikehikeskifish]

The migration is complete. Most users should have their DNS updated by now.

I would still hold off on changing avatars and adding attachments for another week. I will create a separate thread for performance / problems discussions.

Tim