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Forum Closure
The Organ Forum will be closed beginning 7:00 AM MST (GMT-7) October 7th for server migration.
It is anticipated that the migration will take up to five hours; however, as this migration involves moving the Forum to a new hosting provider, it is possible that the Forum may be offline for up to 36 hours. During that time, it is possible that you will not be able to reach the Forum, but more likely you will see a message that the Forum is closed for maintenance. Please plan accordingly.
Background
Regular visitors to the Forum will recall that last May thru August of this year the Forum experienced sluggish interaction and service disruptions lasting several days or more. Initially, our hosting provider claimed that the outages were due to the fact that our database had exceeded its allotted size and needed to be moved to its own server. In theory, this move should have not only remedied the problem but also improved its previous operational performance. In actuality it got worse. Support then recommended yet another upgrade to the database server, but again there was no improvement to the problem. Then support said that it was necessary to upgrade to their most expensive database plan. This was done, increasing the monthly Forum operating costs three-fold. This again was not successful in fixing the problem. After further complaints to Support, they finally were forced to investigate further, as there were no additional upgrades possible. In July, they did some undefined "updates" to the configuration, and admittedly implied that the metrics they were using to diagnose the problem were faulty. Finally, the performance of the Forum improved and the frequency and duration of the outages decreased, but there still some occasional issues. In order to improve things to an acceptable and consistent level of performance, in August I added a CDN, a proxy service that provided caching of Forum content in order to reduce the demand on the Forum's web and database servers. Since then, the Forum has operated more or less consistently with few issues.
Due to the ongoing problems, lack of resolution and the tripled cost of operation, I began exploring alternatives to our current hosting provider over the summer, and we will be moving to a cloud-based solution.
About the Migration and What to Expect
Over the past several weeks I have been preparing for the move. Although moving the Forum's data and infrastructure would seem to be simple and straight forward, in reality there are many pieces that need to be dealt with. At this time, I'm relatively confident that these pieces are sufficiently in place to attempt the move. There is huge number of files that first must be downloaded from the current provider and then uploaded to the new server which is a time-consuming process. The other time-consuming item is the time it takes for our new hosting location to propagate across the internet. This can take anywhere from an hour to several days, which is why there is such a spread in the times to accomplish the migration given above.
During the first stages of the migration, which involve copying data from the old to the new server, the Forum will continue to be served from our current hosting provider. During that time, the Forum should be reachable but will display a closed for maintenance message. Once the data has been moved, security certificates installed, and proper operation of the Forum verified, the Forum's location on the internet will be updated to point to the new server. As mentioned above, the propagation time for this location data is variable, and not under our control. Some of you will be able to connect to the new site very soon thereafter, while it might take considerably longer for other users. Until the new Forum address has propagated to your ISP, you will continue to see the Forum on the old server and the closed for maintenance message. Once the address has propagated, you will be viewing the Forum from the new server and you will see a message to that affect.
Expect the following:
- The Organ Forum will be offline for several hours beginning 7:00 AM MST (GMT-7) Friday October 7th.
- Once the Forum is installed on its new host, there will be a period of time during which its new location is propagated across the internet. For most users, this time will be under 24 hours, but could take longer for some users.
- Although it should always be possible to navigate to the Organ Forum, there may be times when your browser displays an error message instead.
- Clearing your browser cache may expedite your ability access to the new site once the new server is online.
- The migration should be complete in under 36 hours. If after that time, you are still being navigated to the old site (as indicated by the site closed message), clear your browser cache and try again.
- If you use Remember Me when signing into the Forum, you may not be automatically signed into the new Forum location and will have to sign in again.
- There should be no changes to the appearance or the operation of the Forum as the result of this migration.
- The Organ Forum Gallery will be offline indefinitely during and after the migration. Its migration to the new server will take place at a later date once the proper operation of the Forum on the new server has been determined.
- There may be a temporary disruption of notification emails (for subscription, private messages, etc.) for several days after the migration.
- It is possible that the migration process will fail and need to be aborted. In that case, the old site will be restored and fully operational until the problems are fixed and the migration re-attempted.
- No data should be lost as the result of the migration.
- If you encounter problems as the result of the migration process, contact Admin by clicking the Contact Us link in the footer at the bottom of the page. Please include the nature of the problem, the steps taken to arrive at it, and exact wording of any error message displayed.
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