I have been very tied up for the past 10 days or so and have not, until now, had an opportunity to address the hosting situation as well as thank those who are knee deep in it.
As of last check, since launch, ST has experienced a total downtime of 74 hours with the majority of those occurring in the past 10 days. This is completely unacceptable and regardless of guarantees by the current host, Stormtrack will be changing providers.
My initial plan was to put ST in the cloud to accomplish both scalability and dependability and I should have but ended up going with a more localized host. This host experienced a catastrophic hardware failure and the failover I purchased for the site either did not work properly or never existed. I'm unsure at this point.
Stormtrack has a new home being built and tested in the Amazon EC2 cloud network. This is an extremely reliable, secure system that should guarantee us as near to 100% uptime as feasibly possible. Yes, this route will be quite a bit more expensive as the site continues to grow in content and media, as well as members and followers. @Todd Rector @Mark Blue and @Ben Holcomb are spearheading the server change and are about halfway finished with the task. Once it's finished, we will invite some people to come try and break it. When any issues are resolved, we will turn on the EC2 instances, change DNS, and ST will run better than ever.
Now, all of this said, ST will not be changing. It will look and feel the same, it'll just be served from a different place. I might have a surprise for everyone up my sleeve that we could not add with the old host. Wait and see on that...
Anyway, I cannot thank ALL of the ST staff enough for their hard work and the membership for your understanding. We are getting things squared away in the background and performing constant back-ups of your content to ensure no loss occurs. So post confidently!
I'll update again in the near term.
As of last check, since launch, ST has experienced a total downtime of 74 hours with the majority of those occurring in the past 10 days. This is completely unacceptable and regardless of guarantees by the current host, Stormtrack will be changing providers.
My initial plan was to put ST in the cloud to accomplish both scalability and dependability and I should have but ended up going with a more localized host. This host experienced a catastrophic hardware failure and the failover I purchased for the site either did not work properly or never existed. I'm unsure at this point.
Stormtrack has a new home being built and tested in the Amazon EC2 cloud network. This is an extremely reliable, secure system that should guarantee us as near to 100% uptime as feasibly possible. Yes, this route will be quite a bit more expensive as the site continues to grow in content and media, as well as members and followers. @Todd Rector @Mark Blue and @Ben Holcomb are spearheading the server change and are about halfway finished with the task. Once it's finished, we will invite some people to come try and break it. When any issues are resolved, we will turn on the EC2 instances, change DNS, and ST will run better than ever.
Now, all of this said, ST will not be changing. It will look and feel the same, it'll just be served from a different place. I might have a surprise for everyone up my sleeve that we could not add with the old host. Wait and see on that...
Anyway, I cannot thank ALL of the ST staff enough for their hard work and the membership for your understanding. We are getting things squared away in the background and performing constant back-ups of your content to ensure no loss occurs. So post confidently!
I'll update again in the near term.
