Server Downtime - Changing Hosts

This is forewarning that next weekend will have down time. Probably Friday night through whenever I am done Saturday, or Saturday night through whenever I am done Sunday. Can't be more specific just yet because still trying to figure it out but wanted everyone forewarned well ahead of time.

Follow this thread for updates. During the move you should be able to keep track of progress via IRC and Twitter.

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Current plan is to start this around 4 am central Wednesday morning/tonight.
Site will lock down sometime after 3 AM nearing 4 AM. Updates will be posted via Twitter and IRC.

Because this will involve a change to DNS due to the move to a new host the time each person is unable to reach the new host will differ. Windows users can generally run an nbtstat -RR to force an update to DNS resolution but this is not guaranteed depending on your ISP and you'll also need to refresh your browser cache and possibly reopen your browser.

cheers for this.

Hopefully you have better luck with this new host.

Things can go so horribly wrong at each host, it's really not a pleasant thought.

I have an existing VPS at the primary one I am considering moving to, and haven't had issues there, so maybe all will be well.

I just got this answer back regarding our last outage where the DB and the webserver suddenly stopped being able to find each other on their private intranet within the host but were both visible to the public internet;

Greetings Eosian,

Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you. We got update from our operations team that there was a network migration performed for the subnet on Dec 7th. It was the root cause of your network concern. I can assure you it will not happen again.

An uncommunicated network migration? That's bull, folks. That's an awful lot of customers to randomly screw without warning, or even an after the fact announcement.

Unacceptable.
We are definitely moving.

If you don't mind saying, what hosts are you moving from and to? As a VPS owner myself, I would be interested in avoiding the host you're moving away from. I've had a pretty good experience with Linode.

I'd have to pay nearly six times what it currently costs to move to Linode at the rates listed on their homepage. Those packages are too cookie cutter.

For that expense I'd be better off moving to AWS, but that's irrelevant because this site couldn't pay for itself at those rates.

This may have to be postponed, I am still trying to find a decent replacement host and working to avoid the sort of issues we've had with the last three hosts or so, and it's a rather slow going so far.

I'm glad your taking your time, If we can avoid these problems in the future by postponing our move, i'm sure everyone would prefer that.

My biggest barrier so far has been either absolutely ludicrous prices or completely generic packages that don't correlate to what we need.

I'm working with a few sales departments now trying to work out what they can do custom.

Southperry is a special flower and needs a special server. <3

Eos, I am kinda curious. Can you PM me or post here the bandwidth/CPU/memory usage that SP uses on avg?

Got a new host, setting it up today, might be able to migrate this weekend after all if it pans out.

Fingers still crossed on this host not being crap.

Right now I'm using KnownHost for Happychinchilla.info. I have not had one problem with them in the year or so I've been with them. Strong recommendation for me.

Good news, I've migrated 80% of my sites to the new host. Southperry, MMOStatus and a couple others are left because they require the databases to move to support them.

Still setting up the database but move will be commencing at some point this week.

Updated and re-tweeting reminder.