Bandwidth Drive 2020

Normally we would simply say it’s time to pay the bills for the next year. This year things are changing. Our servers are getting old and will no longer be supported by the hosting company or their operating systems. We have spent a lot of time this year exploring our options based on our needs.

We have had these 2 servers since February 2010. Our first quote was to upgrade both servers. The cost to upgrade was outside of our budget. After going back and forth with the data center we arrived at the best option for us.

Monetarily we will be paying the same as we have for the last 10 years. The down side is we have to lose the Windows server. We simply cannot pay the costs for both servers. The bottom line really becomes the lowest level server the data center supports is about double what we pay for both servers at this time.

There is good news though the move puts us in a much better server than we have. Currently we are in a 32bit server, 3GB ram, Quadcore CPU and 1TB drive. The new server takes us to a 64bit platform, 8 core CPU, 64GB of ram and 2TB of drive space in a RAID 6 environment. This should give us ample drive space for a number of years and increase the ability of the server to handle heavier loads.

We will not be losing any services that we currently provide. Some things will be moved from the .net server to this server. The only function that will probably be lost for a few weeks is FS Host and JoinFS. Those services need to be moved to another server which could happen in the month of Feb or might be March. It’s hard to tell. I am putting a server I bought in an associates business. That business has not opened yet.

Naturally to get the new server online the old one has to go off line. We will post a notice before that happens. The migration process should not be too difficult. What is probably going to take a long time is transferring all the files (currently 250GB) to the new server. Because of the way the new server is going to be configured both the .net as well as the .com servers will not be accessible.

Here’s to a new year.

The Staff