Hi everybody,

No doubt you've noticed the incessant slowness and occasional 503 errors popping up. I promise you, this frustrates us as much as it does you. At this point, we're reasonably sure the slowness is an effect of our shared hosting setup -- basically, NGA lives on the same server as a bunch of other sites, and we're all competing for resources. If someone grabs too much, everyone else slows down.

We talked to the support folks a couple of days ago, tried the things they suggested, and unfortunately performance didn't improve much at all. Granted, right now things are running pretty smoothly, but the last few days were rough, and we've had the same issue several times in the past. Overall, the recurring slowdowns have become enough of a problem that we're looking at real solutions (i.e., besides "wait for the problem to go away").

So, we're going to try changing up our hosting plan a bit. In theory, the switchover should be transparent, and the only change will be that suddenly everything stops breaking quite so often. Of course, in theory a lot of things could happen. So we'll see how this goes.

I'll be hitting the button around 2am EST (when there generally aren't many people online); the switchover may take a few hours. If things break horribly and you can't get to the site, we're terribly sorry, and rest assured we'll be investigating what went wrong as soon as possible. Worst case, it goes horribly wrong and everything breaks, and we go back to the only-slightly-broken setup.

Cheers,
Welder

p.s. If things do break badly enough that you can't send angry PMs, feel free to berate us at [email protected].

I'm sure you've already thought of this and either done it or come up with good reasons why it's impractical, but is there a plan to back things up just in case everything goes splodey?

Yep, ran a file backup earlier, and now doing just finished a database backup (even though that shouldn't be affected), just in case.

I put on some early Ted Nugent in your honor.

thanks

Is this one o those where a whole mess of posts will get deleted so we might as well stop posting?

I don't expect any posts to be lost, no.

This ain't the mothership there, junior.

so it's coming up on 3 EST. did this already happen? because if so you were hella not joking about seamlessness.

I set things in motion an hour ago but it's taking time to transfer. In retrospect the timing could have been a lot better.

s'all good, even welders need to sleep sometimes

Welcome to our shiny new host, everyone!

It's lightning fast! Thanks for all your hard work!

Yes, thank you for working on this!

Well mr call everyone junior, I know you may have forgotten this but the www. -> forum. transition here had to get rid of some posts.

Forgot mjack.
Old people and their superior memories.... sheesh.

Nice work Welder. Much faster and smoother than the past week has been.

Another problem solved before I noticed it. Hurrah! Good welding everyone. My work here is done [flies off into sunset]