SERVER UPGRADE: This Saturday, 9/3/05, 12:00 AM

[Greg]

Some of you may have noticed some poor performance lately. AlpineZone.com also continues to grow and actually reached 80% of its allocated bandwidth for the month of August. I expect traffic to continue to increase over the next few months so as a pre-emptive measure, I've decided to have our great Web host, JaguarPC, move the site to a new semi-dedicated server this weekend.

Currently, this site is hosted on a shared server with up to 249 other Web sites. The server's performance is somewhat at the mercy of the efficiency of all the Website's scripts and programs. If some other Website is running something whacky that hogs server resources, all sites suffer. With a semi-dedicated server, only 10 sites are served from a single server. While there's still a chance of some other rogue Website taking the server down, the risk is significantly less. Additionally, we will get more bandwidth and disk storage which should hold us over through the 2005-06 ski season.

I have scheduled the transfer for this Saturday, 9/3/2005 at midnight. Since there's an IP address change associated with this type of conversion, there will likely be some downtime over the weekend as the DNS entry propogates throughout the Internet. I suspect the site will be fully accessible by Monday. Unfortunately, I will be out of town from Friday until Monday and will have no Internet access so hopefully things will go smoothly. I have the utmost faith in JagPC so I don't foresee any problems. I'll provide an update on Tuesday.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience. I expect this conversion will give us better performance and capacity as AlpineZone.com continues to grow at a very rapid pace.

[ctenidae]

I'm all for better performance, but the thought of no AZ all weekend scares me. If anyone's looking, I'll be curled up in a ball under the ski rack, drooling slightly and muttering "snowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnow..."

[bvibert]

Awesome, hopefully everything goes smoothly while you're away...

[Brettski]

Originally Posted by ctenidae

I'm all for better performance, but the thought of no AZ all weekend scares me. If anyone's looking, I'll be curled up in a ball under the ski rack, drooling slightly and muttering "snowsnowsnowsnowsnowsnow..."

crack me up....

249 other sites? Good lord...I'm amazed that the response is as good as it is.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by ctenidae

the thought of no AZ all weekend scares me.

This is not definite. DNS propogation can happen within 24 hours or take as long as 72. It's hard to say who'll get access first. Anyway, it's going to be a great weekend so get out and hike and then you all can report back on Monday/Tuesday. Have a fantastic Labor Day weekend, all!

[MichaelJ]

Well, that was pretty painless! Up already for me, no problems so far.

Since your domain records come back with a 24-hour TTL, I'm impressed that I'm already getting to the new site.

[ALLSKIING]

Working VERY well for me..Very quick.

[Greg]

Indeed. Everything seems to be working well. Kudos to JagPC for the seamless conversion! If anyone has any issues, please contact me at contact@alpinezone.com or send me a PM.

[Greg]

We seem to be humming right along on the new server. Has everyone else found the performance/reliability to be better now?

[bvibert]

I haven't had any timeouts or noticed any slow downs that I can remember since then. I kinda forgot all about it to tell you the truth...