CHUBBYPARADE

Time for a new frontpage article! Alright, alright, I know... the goal of having a new article every week was a little too ambitious. Well, at least there's enough developments now to write another front page article. So let's get down to it!

Firstly, the downtime connected to the server move two months ago seems to have aggravated a lot of members. Well, believe me, it certainly did not go as smoothly as I had planned. Here's the gist: I had managed to get a better deal from my hosting company. Remember the frequent "server busy" messages that we had a couple of months ago? That's the reason why a server upgrade was necessary. So the hosting company agreed to move the whole website to a new server. It actually took them almost two weeks to complete this move! And during this time I had no notice at all on their progress. So the Chubby Parade had to stay offline the whole time. Otherwise we would have lost data in the move. Even I, the admin, did not know if we were already running on the new server or the old one.
After the two weeks, I got notice that the transfer was completed and that we were running on the new server.
Well, I had enough by then. Contacted a new hosting company that made me an even better deal. Better hardware for less money - I could simply not say no to that. So after about a week of being online again, we went offline. Lo and behold - everything was set up and moved by the new hosting company in two days! After only three days of downtime, we were already running on the new server.
In case you are interested about the hardware: Dual Xeon 3.2 ghz processors, 800FSB, 4GB DDR Ram, 2 x 400 GB U320 SCSI hard drives in a Raid 1 mirror, 2 Intel 1000Mbps Ethernet cards. Especially the Raid setup saves us the additional cost of a backup. Raid 1 means harddrive mirroring. So we have 400GB in total for the Parade. The data is stored on both drives. So if one of them fails, the host will simply take it out and replace it with a new drive, without any data loss. So that's the story of the server move of 2009.

I want to say a big thank you to Katybug who some weeks ago decided to move to new ventures. She had been a long-time supporter and moderator of the forum. It was so great to have you on here, Katy. Good luck to you.
Btw, it was reported to the mods that Banana Palmer was sighted in the outskirts of Chubbyland! So all hope is not lost that the King of Banana Land might make his return one day...
Nov 30, 2009 - 4:28 PM | by admin |