February 6, 2016 :: Wildfire Server Upgrade

[Jason]

Update:  I had this on our status page but didn't include it here.  I will start this maintenance at 2am Eastern/New York on February 6 -- approximately 6 hours from now

Server "Wildfire" is one of our older servers and is overdue for an upgrade.  Whereas it's performing well for the majority of the day, it's starting to struggle during "resource-heavy" timeframes -- during server backups, for example -- and it doesn't do a good job of handling random load spikes which we see from time to time if certain sites get a lot of traffic.

With that in mind, I'm going to upgrade the server tonight to a platform with more powerful processors, more RAM ("memory") and a faster hard drive configuration (RAID 10).  If you're on this server, I imagine you may see a noticeable improvement once complete.

This is one of the advantages to our present platform -- I can upgrade rather easily vs. a physical server migration that takes weeks to coordinate and lots of manual procedures.

What to expect:

1. When I start the migration, Wildfire will experience the equivalent of a reboot -- maybe 15-30 (max) of complete service interruption.
2. After the initial outage, the service will be up like normal while all data from the server transfers from the existing server to the new one in the background.  This part can take anywhere from a few hours to 10-12+ hours.
3. Once all data has transferred, the server will experience a second/final outage where it essentially restarts again.  This sometimes takes longer but is usually in the 15-30 minute time frame.

Once complete, that's it.  All data is now on the new server and running live without any action from you or Charlottezweb.

I will update this post once initiated and as it proceeds.  No action is required from you but I wanted to advise that you may notice two periods of outages within the next 24 hours.

Thank you,
Jason

[Jason]

I've sent an email to all customers on this server as of a few minutes ago.  (Apologies, I was trying to cleanup the email when I accidentally sent it so you may have noticed some strange formatting at the top where it referenced you by name). 

I've posted this to our Server Status page.  Please watch that page for updates as I have them.

http://www.charlottezweb.com/clients/serverstatus.php

Thanks!

[Jason]

The resize is still running.  I will update this post once completed.

Thank you,
Jason

[Jason]

The server appears to be in the final stage of the resize and is currently down while this completes.

I'll update once this is complete.

[Jason]

Thank you for your patience -- The server resize has completed as of 4:21pm Eastern.