Joel
TS Technical Admin
- Favourite Ride
- Closed season on TST
Hello, and good news everyone!
As you've probably experienced of late, our site and popularity seems to have outgrown our current server and platform we've had lovingly and trustily support us from the beginning, like a baby growing out of their first little booties. Awwww! <3
What's the problem?
As a result, we're experiencing regular performance issues, and unfortunately lately I've had far too many automatic notifications telling me that the server performance is slow, and in some instances non-existent, with software falling over due to the heavy demand. We're breaking massive barriers with page views (reaching well and truly into 6 figures per week now, with 7 fast approaching!) and bandwidth transferred, and its really pleasing to see from a popularity point of view!
Our hosting partners, FutureHosting and the delightful support technician Betty have supported us since the beginning, and have worked hard to optimise and keep things running smoothly, but we are reaching the performance limits of virtualisation, so we have been considering for some time to expand to a dedicated platform, but waiting for the best opportunity.
With constraints around ongoing University work I've unfortunately not had the time to research, plan and carry out the move of servers until recent, and with my Uni work ramping up again after this month and being in the low end of the season of the park, now is the perfect opportunity for us to carry out the move now all of the research, planning and procurement is out of the way from the last few weeks.
What's changing?
Our dedicated platform will allows us to continue growing further, improve speed and responsiveness, and also allow us to bring back much loved and missed features, including our chat, pub quizzes and 'radio' that many have yearned to return!
We're also changing our setup slightly, and some of you may have been very familiar with CloudFlare who work to speed up and proxy the site currently to keep things as fast as possible for you, and we're also changing the background server arrangement to introduce another proxy to help speed up static content being served.
The server specifications are quite frankly ridiculous, but we're trying to future-proof ourselves for a little while longer to allow for our continued growth and popularity. One amazing new feature is that we're going 100% SSD (solid state disk) to allow for faster MySQL performance, so we're excited to see how SMF and WordPress will perform under full load on the new server.
When is this changing?
We're looking to move the site across beginning the afternoon of Thursday 20th February (this week!) from around 4pm, with the move expecting to last most of the evening and possibly into Friday too.
The planned window is 4pm Thursday to 4pm Friday, but we're naturally hoping for it to be much less.
During this time, access to the site, forum and wiki* will be unavailable. However, our brand new chat room will be open in time for the maintenance, so you can join the team for an evening and late night chat session to catch up on the good old times, and keep abreast of the work also!
*(Ridecount sign in will also be affected, although Ridecount is also under maintenance from Wednesday too)
Nothing else will change during this time, so there's nothing you need to worry about changing or being different!
What can I do to help?
You can send supplies of Pizza and Red Bull to Worcester. If you need to get a reply in on the forum, please try to do it well before 4pm on Thursday so we can get backups started quickly to move.
And you'll likely encounter some odd pages and errors if you continue trying to browse the site after 4pm, so sit back and relax, we'll be taking care of moving everything safely to our new server.
You can join us in our live chat room (exact address will be confirmed on the moving page and posted shortly before too) for all the latest gossip and updates on the move too!
And finally...
Once again we'd like to give a great big THANK YOU! to all of you for your continued support and love of TowersStreet - without it, we wouldn't be here looking to expand in such a way!
We've got lots of exciting things planned for summer for the site as well as some great meetups, so we're really excited about the future too - and pleased that you are all here to be a part of it
(Pssst, to our secret envious admirer... #alreadygotabetterserver ;-) )
As you've probably experienced of late, our site and popularity seems to have outgrown our current server and platform we've had lovingly and trustily support us from the beginning, like a baby growing out of their first little booties. Awwww! <3
What's the problem?
As a result, we're experiencing regular performance issues, and unfortunately lately I've had far too many automatic notifications telling me that the server performance is slow, and in some instances non-existent, with software falling over due to the heavy demand. We're breaking massive barriers with page views (reaching well and truly into 6 figures per week now, with 7 fast approaching!) and bandwidth transferred, and its really pleasing to see from a popularity point of view!
Our hosting partners, FutureHosting and the delightful support technician Betty have supported us since the beginning, and have worked hard to optimise and keep things running smoothly, but we are reaching the performance limits of virtualisation, so we have been considering for some time to expand to a dedicated platform, but waiting for the best opportunity.
With constraints around ongoing University work I've unfortunately not had the time to research, plan and carry out the move of servers until recent, and with my Uni work ramping up again after this month and being in the low end of the season of the park, now is the perfect opportunity for us to carry out the move now all of the research, planning and procurement is out of the way from the last few weeks.
What's changing?
Our dedicated platform will allows us to continue growing further, improve speed and responsiveness, and also allow us to bring back much loved and missed features, including our chat, pub quizzes and 'radio' that many have yearned to return!
We're also changing our setup slightly, and some of you may have been very familiar with CloudFlare who work to speed up and proxy the site currently to keep things as fast as possible for you, and we're also changing the background server arrangement to introduce another proxy to help speed up static content being served.
The server specifications are quite frankly ridiculous, but we're trying to future-proof ourselves for a little while longer to allow for our continued growth and popularity. One amazing new feature is that we're going 100% SSD (solid state disk) to allow for faster MySQL performance, so we're excited to see how SMF and WordPress will perform under full load on the new server.
When is this changing?
We're looking to move the site across beginning the afternoon of Thursday 20th February (this week!) from around 4pm, with the move expecting to last most of the evening and possibly into Friday too.
The planned window is 4pm Thursday to 4pm Friday, but we're naturally hoping for it to be much less.
During this time, access to the site, forum and wiki* will be unavailable. However, our brand new chat room will be open in time for the maintenance, so you can join the team for an evening and late night chat session to catch up on the good old times, and keep abreast of the work also!
*(Ridecount sign in will also be affected, although Ridecount is also under maintenance from Wednesday too)
Nothing else will change during this time, so there's nothing you need to worry about changing or being different!
What can I do to help?
And you'll likely encounter some odd pages and errors if you continue trying to browse the site after 4pm, so sit back and relax, we'll be taking care of moving everything safely to our new server.
You can join us in our live chat room (exact address will be confirmed on the moving page and posted shortly before too) for all the latest gossip and updates on the move too!
And finally...
Once again we'd like to give a great big THANK YOU! to all of you for your continued support and love of TowersStreet - without it, we wouldn't be here looking to expand in such a way!
We've got lots of exciting things planned for summer for the site as well as some great meetups, so we're really excited about the future too - and pleased that you are all here to be a part of it
(Pssst, to our secret envious admirer... #alreadygotabetterserver ;-) )
