ActiveRain Server Upgrades and Scheduled More Downtime 2/16/2012

On Tuesday evening, February 14th, starting at 8pm Pacific Time ActiveRain will be down for scheduled updates to our servers.  ActiveRain will be down until midnight or 12:00am on Wednesday morning.  

Updated: On Thursday Evening, February 16th, starting at 8pm Pacific Time, ActiveRain will be down for scheduled updates to our servers. We expect this downtime to last for 4 hours, until Midnight Pacific time.

(On Tuesday night, the first scheduled downtime, our development team ran into a last minute issue, that had they continued could have compromised the stability of the site. Instead of push forward, we decided to pull back and retest in order to make sure things go smoothly with the upgrade)

In fact, we will be moving from having our servers hosted with a host company, to having our servers hosted at the Market Leader data center, nice and close to home here in Washington. We are excited to bring our servers back under our control, something we haven't had around here since 2007 when we had considerably fewer members and tons less content.

For the last week, we have had a group of 100+ ActiveRain members testing the new configuration on the new servers. These people have donated some of their time to test the new server configuration and stamp out any bugs. We are very thankful that our members have been willing to help us with this extensive move.

I wouldn't call myself a computer guy........in fact, when we are talking about computer hardware, I'd call myself completely clueless. Luckily, The technology team at Market Leader has some very bright and talented people who eat, sleep and dream computer hardware. In conjuction with the ActiveRain development team, (led by the fearless Chris) they are working around the clock to get ready for this server migration. 

We are excited about this move because it puts ActiveRain in a better position to continue to increase the performance of the site. This expanded capacity should result in improved page load speeds and better usability for our members.

This isn't the finish line in or efforts to upgrade performance on the site, but it's a major step in the process. We are very excited to have things moving a little bit faster and thrilled at the opportunity to continue to give you a better site through which you can share your experiences, educate one and other and prove your expertise in your local market.