Major Server Migration Under Way

November 21 2013

By Chadwick Meyer

We appreciate all your patience as we've been focused for the past 4 months on a major server infrastructure upgrade, to rebuild and migrate our hosted CMS to Rackspace's Cloud servers. This has required a rewrite of how we deploy websites, how we roll out updates and versions to the core code base, how we manage hosting, how we connect with databases, and many overall changes to how the CMS works across multiple web servers, connecting with a cluster of read and write database servers, and other servers for extra services.

Major Upgrades

We've grown from 2 web servers at our old host to 10 new servers at Rackspace.
We can scale to make each of these servers 32 times more powerful if necessary and deploy new servers within minutes.
If a web server fails, we can restore a new one from nightly snapshots within 30 minutes and have your site back online without any data loss.
The servers can remain small because we have migrated all your personal files off the web server to cloud files, which makes storage more affordable and the files faster to load with better redundancy and backup.
The databases are arranged in a cluster with multiple read and write database servers. This creates a lot of backups of the data and also allows the databases to fail over to each other if there are any issues with one of the read or write servers.
We can easily add more database servers to handle more traffic and load.
If you are unhappy with performance, expect a lot of traffic or need to grow, we can easily migrate you to your own server to handle as much load as you need.

Overall, this is a huge improvement, which if it works well you'll never take the time to notice.

Migration

We are ready to proceed with helping you point your domain to the new server where your site is already residing and waiting to perform. Before you migrate though, we want you to test your site at your "local domain" which is your main username.gutensite.net.

You can find your local domain in the new "Domain & DNS Settings" page. Please test your site, and if everything looks and works perfectly, you can follow the instrustions on that page and update your A and CNAME records for your DNS at your domain registrar.

Migration Deadline

In order to not drag out the disconnect between the new web servers and the old database servers, we need you to point your domain to the new servers by Monday, December 2, 2013 at 12:00pm PST. After this date, the old server will be in "read only" mode and will be an archive of your site (no updates will appear). The server will be shut down fully on Friday, December 6, 2013 at 12:00pm PST. This gives you ten days from today to test and complete the migration, and another 4 days of extra buffer if you absolutely need it.

Act Now

Currently gutensite.com (where the Control Panel is hosted) and gutensite.net (where the preview domains are hosted) are both running on the new servers. But as long as we have websites running on the old server we have to update the database on the old server, which is slow to do from outside that local network in a different datacenter. Also the old server has some issues (it crashed again today), so we want you to migrate as soon as possible.

Beware

Until the database servers are accessed locally on December 2nd, any web page that has to WRITE to the database (update or create new records) will be slightly slow (this mostly just affects the Admin, or form submissions on your website). And if after editing a record you redirect to a page where you expect to see the information you just updated, it *could* be the old info (requiring you to refresh) since the changes have to propagate throughout the slave/read database servers before you can "read" them.

For this reason, if you know what you are doing, you *may* want to wait to migrate until November 31st (as long as you don't forget and you give up to 72 hours for your DNS to propagate).

Thank You for Patience

We know how important your website is, and we want to make sure this is as painless as possible. But please be gracious during this process, and realistically anticipate some bugs in the first couple of weeks. We'll be working overtime to respond and fix them ASAP. Despite any problems, we are confident that after the migration settles down, this is going to be a huge improvement for the long term reliability and scalability of your website.

Thank you so much for your business.

Tags : server, migration, rackspace, cloud, database, redundant, secure

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