Server maintenance - Monday 9/28

[Janet H]

On Monday 9/28 our data center will be doing some updates and maintenance. They have notified us that our servers may be offline for some period*of time and that the maintenance*window is 4PM - 11PM EDT* We have little control over this and there*may be no noticeable*service interruption but I wanted to let you know that it's a possibility.

 

[EA37TS]

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Bob Denman]

Will I survive the Dark Spell?? :hide:

 

[The_Breeze]

Hey Janet,
Is the updated look and feel in this round?

They could run a separate farm and perform a failover for minimal service disruption. We used to have a system that could redirect our URLs to another farm (IP addresses), perhaps even in another data center. Then we were free to update the farms at leisure. Redundancy was required and failover testing had to occur quarterly so that process was leveraged for things like this. Just a thought.

 

[Janet H]

Hey Janet,
Is the updated look and feel in this round?

No - just some server updates.

 

[Treasur2]

On Monday 9/28 our data center will be doing some updates and maintenance. They have notified us that our servers may be offline for some period*of time and that the maintenance*window is 4PM - 11PM EDT* We have little control over this and there*may be no noticeable*service interruption but I wanted to let you know that it's a possibility.

Thanks. I would like to learn about the systems behind the forum. I'm thinking of doing a similar thing for my business. Nothing to do with RVing. Can you point me to who your using for a software, etc.?

 

[Janet H]

We are currently using an old version of vBulletin to power the forum.

We are planning to change platforms in the coming year and move to xenforos software BUT you need more than forum software - you also need hosting and regular updates and some tech chops to keep it all running. the current version of vBulletin offers some of those services rolled into the license agreement. Do some research...

 

[Treasur2]

I worked in IT and data centers for 15 years. Thank you.

 

[Janet H]

I worked in IT and data centers for 15 years. Thank you.

In that case - look hard at xenforo.

 

[Treasur2]

Is this the place to ask further questions, or do you have an email or chat service\handle you would care to share. Perhaps there is even a URL for administrators someplace?

 

[The_Breeze]

We are currently using an old version of vBulletin to power the forum.

We are planning to change platforms in the coming year and move to xenforos software BUT you need more than forum software - you also need hosting and regular updates and some tech chops to keep it all running. the current version of vBulletin offers some of those services rolled into the license agreement. Do some research...

I would think he should consider the underlying OS and move from there. Windows and Linux are the most popular base. There's others out there but that's going to take some some time. Red Hat just started charging for it's software.

He also has to think about hits. How many front ends, how many application and database servers. It may have to be a 3 tier architecture depending on the amount of hits he thinks it'll generate. Usually splitting the load between three front ends, 2 app server and a database server get you started. You can scale horizontally and/or vertically. It's a good platform to get started with. You just have to decide from there

There's also code promotion. The number one thing you can do to discourage people from coming back to your site is a break. That requires testing and reiteration until the breaks are fixed. It should happen in different environments. Developers work in Dev, Testers work in test and users run in production. SCRUM or Waterfall, it should happen. Otherwise he may he may sacrifice reputation risk as well as lost revenue from bad user experiences.

Last I heard the MSFT cloud only charged you for servers in use, so if you overload the other servers kick in. When traffic is low, they fade away and you won't be charged for their use and they'll possible use them for some one else (multi-hosting). AWS is another option and one I know little about. The downside: if your sharing the server with someone else, you're performance could degrade and that's not good for business - no matter the provider.

I ran a 3 business-class server farm in my den. It ran 3 virtual farms: dev, test and prod. They had 3 front ends, 2 app servers and a database server. The DB server ran 3 partitions for each of the environments. It never got enough traffic to capture performance data but it served my purpose.

There's a lot to think about. Either jump in with both feet and take the plunge or do your homework - just try not to get caught up in analyses paralysis.

Look into Dell refurbished servers. Not a lot of investment to see how it all goes. They'll run windows and linux (unix), so no worries there. The I/O core may have be evaluated before you pull the trigger. You may need different drivers if you go unix.

Good luck.

 

[Janet H]

Is this the place to ask further questions, or do you have an email or chat service\handle you would care to share. Perhaps there is even a URL for administrators someplace?

You can just send me a PM if you have more questions.

 

[The_Breeze]

Dropping out.