October 1, 2016 :: Vortex server upgrade

Started by Jason, September 29, 2016, 03:49:52 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Jason

The following email is being sent to customers on server "Vortex" in the next 10-15 minutes:   Given that this also impacts Charlottezweb.com's website, I'll post this to our Twitter feed and Status page.  I'll send a shorter/modified version to all customers.
----------------

Greetings from Charlottezweb,

This email is going to customers on server:  Vortex. 

This is our semi-dedicated server with 6 customer accounts -- 1 of which is Charlottezweb.com itself.

I'm going to be resizing ("upgrading") this server this coming weekend to a more powerful setup.  This is mainly to address disk space on the server which is nearing 80% consumption. As an added benefit, the upgrade will include faster processors and a faster hard drive configuration. 

No action is required on your part.  This is a notification of service disruption.

The resize consists of a few stages:

1. There is a brief outage of all services that typically is in the range of 5-15 minutes at most.
2. After that, the server runs as normal while files are transferred to the newer configuration in the background.  Your sites and services should run normally during this stage of the process.
3. Once that's complete, there's a second outage (longer in duration) where any files that have changed since step 1 are migrated and the server is restarted.  Given that Vortex is already a pretty powerful server on fast SSD hard drives, this shouldn't take as long as some of our past upgrades though to be safe, it could be as long as 1-2 hours.  I'm hoping it's closer to 30 minutes or less if possible.

As of now, I'm going to target early morning Saturday (New York timezone) to initiate this upgrade.  If all goes well, it should be complete in under a few hours.

If anyone has any issues around this proposed time, please reply to me to discuss further.  This isn't anything urgent but I'd like to get it completed sooner than later.

I'm going to post this on our Status page as well as on our forum [in this thread].

Thank you!

Regards,
Jason

Jason

The upgrade process has begun for this server.  I will update this post once completed.

Jason

#2
The upgrade of Vortex has completed.   Downtime during the restarts was monitored by Pingdom at approximately 1 minute.

Thank you,
Jason