A server upgrade is planned for Monday morning 01/05/2004. This isn't a mission critical system, so declaring an outage isn't required, but please understand that posts made between 12:00am and 8:00am CST may not be stored.

We have planned installation of this new production server for some time now, and the first few weeks of AudioRoundTable.com operation were made using a less powerful development server as a preliminary step. It was a preview period, to allow us to test some things and work the kinks out. No search engines have cataloged the site yet, nor will they for several more weeks, so it was expected that traffic would be light. This allowed us to preview the system and still have an easy transition to the production server.

The move will be done with both systems side-by-side, essentially being mirror copies of one another. The initial development server will be switched to the full production server by pushing its IP address onto the DNS nameservers. There will be a period of time when you will not know whether you are contacting the old server or the new, but service will be provided by one or the other servers through this entire transition period. The trouble is that posts made on the old server will not be automatically transferred to the new. But system access is not expected to be disrupted, and you will be able to view files during the entire event.

Our schedule of events is to copy all website content to the new server at midnight, and begin the DNS name change at 2:00am. The DNS change will propagate through the internet nameservers between 2:00am and 7:00am, and full service will be provided by the production server by 8:00am. At this point, we will inspect the contents of both systems and verify the production server. If there are any problems, we will rollback to the old development server. If not, the development server will be taken offline, and the production upgrade will be declared a success.

Traffic, Resource Planning and Search Engine Placement

Alta Vista and Google should start indexing AudioRoundTable.com this month or early February. Many of the other search engine sites will have us listed sometime in the first quarter of the year and we'll start appearing high in their search results. Slower cataloging systems like Yahoo won't have us listed until summertime. So we'll see growth in the first few months which will fill out some of the slower forums and even more so the ones that already have traffic. But we'll be ready for it - The production server will perform well under heavy load.