Server Upgrade and Migration Announcement

November 22 2013

By Chadwick Meyer

Do not ignore this CRITICAL information about your website and our major server upgrade and migration.

Big Picture

In order to ensure the long term reliability of your website we have been working hard on your behalf for the past four months to create a brand new server infrastructure with the redundancy and scalability that will serve you far into the future. There may be some elements that are temporarily inconvenient and frustrating for you over the next few days of migration. I am really sorry for those things in advance, but this upgrade is absolutely necessary and good for your website long term.

This upgrade has entailed massive rewrites of how our CMS must now function across multiple web servers, interacting with many different cloud storage systems and databases. We have tested our platform rigorously and are aware of a few remaining minor bugs that we are working to fix. But on thursday, the old server had a kernel panic that took it down for 45 minutes, and we feel it is in your best interests to complete this migration as soon as possible.

So I thank you for your patience and graciousness and I want to assure you that we are doing everything we can to make this as smooth as possible. We will respond to questions, prioritize the bugs and get them all resolved as quickly as possible.

Full Details

Read the blog article for full details about the migration benefits and be sure to frequently check for any status issues and tips at twitter.com/gutenstatus

Current Status

Test your site right now. Your site is not migrated yet and if it's not loading see section below. We have migrated our website at gutensite.com (which includes the Control Panel) and we've migrated all preview domains at gutensite.net (to preview your website on the new server). But your website will not migrate until YOU update your DNS settings. Read more under the Migration Steps section.

Site Not Loading?

Since migrating our domain name to the new servers, a few of you have alerted us that your site is not loading. We're very sorry. This is because your domain's DNS settings have been incorrect for quite some time, and our domain migration just exposed the problem. Most likely you pointed the CNAME for 'www' to a 'gutensite.com' domain instead of your domain. Since gutensite.com is no longer residing at the same old server where your site is still located, traffic is being directed to the server where our domain is pointed.

Please ask your Domain Registrar (where you bought the domain) to help you implement the correct A and CNAME records according to the Old Server DNS Settings (below), or email us the login information for your domain registrar account and we'll fix it for you.

Old Server DNS Settings
To get your website back online temporarily at the old server, make sure you have the following two records:

TYPE	NAME	DATA
A	yourdomain.com	204.11.244.154
CNAME	www.yourdomain.com	yourdomain.com

Migration Steps

Preview Site. Check that your website looks and functions correctly at your preview domain on the new server (e.g. username.gutensite.net). Login to Control Panel and go to the Support section and click on "Domain & DNS Settings" page to see your "preview domain".
Update DNS. Once you are sure your website looks good on the new server, update your Domain(s) DNS to point to your web server's IP address (see below) before the migration deadline.

DNS Settings for New Server

Many of you are pointing your entire domain to our name servers (e.g.ns1.gutensite.com or ns1.cratebuilt.com) and we used to help you manage your DNS settings for free. This is no longer advised, and we asked you to update this 4 months ago (but some still have not). These name servers will not work anymore after the migration. Check the Name Servers for your domain, and if it lists our old name servers above, you must either ask us to manage your domain DNS for you ($25/yr on Rackspace's DNS servers) or you must manage your own domain DNS settings at your domain registrar. This will require that you add the basic website records below, in addition to any other custom settings you need for other subdomains or MX records (for email).

Please ask your domain registrar to help you implement the settings that we specify in the control panel (or email us your registrar account login and we will do it for you).

To see the correct IP address for YOUR web server, Login at: https://admin1.gutensite.com/admin/support/dns and follow the instructions in the Control Panel. Under the "Support" section follow the side link for "Domain & DNS Settings". This will show you your web server's IP address and the correct settings for your A and CNAME record.

TYPE	NAME	DATA
A	yourdomain.com	[See Admin for IP Address]
CNAME	www.yourdomain.com	yourdomain.com

Migration Schedule

We want to give you reasonable time to make these changes, but we must migrate quickly because of temporary slowness caused by databases and websites residing on different data centers during this migration.

So you must 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 need it. If there are emergencies or any delay caused by bugs on our end, we will extend this date.

Report Issues

We are working on fixing some small bugs on the new platform, but if you find other issues, please email us to make sure we're aware of it. Be assured that we'll get it fixed as soon as humanly possible.

If you have a genuine emergency where your website does not load and you have already tried to update the DNS, email our emergency address in the control panel and I will respond (day or night). But please use this ONLY if your website is inaccessible.

Thank You

Thank you for your business and for letting us serve you for so many years. Thank you for your continued patience as we work extra hard to complete this server migration on your behalf.

Sincerely,

Chadwick Meyer

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

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