Over the past few months, James has blogged about efforts to make OTB more cost-neutral. Over most of June and July, working around my appendectomy, he and I have made progress on a number of background changes that should greatly help with that. The good news is nothing so far has broken… well until later today.
One of the biggest changes is that we’re moving to a new, faster server.* In keeping with best tech practices, we’re going to do the final move, including redirecting that domain, on Friday afternoon.**
If all goes as planned OTB will become unavailable in the early afternoon, eastern time. We will then copy the most recent posts and comments over to the new instance and then, redirect our domain. If nothing scary happens, that should take about an hour and we should be up and running no later than 4pm at our new domain.***
To assist with the transition, I’ll be turning comments off at 1pm ET. That will make it easier to do the backup and minimize downtime. So set your watches and vent your spleens while you can!
*—Lesson learned: Always go back and check on old service contracts to see if you are paying for more than you are actually getting. Unfortunately, many companies will not tell you about deals that are better than the grandfathered plan you are on.
**—Ask me about the time in the late 1990’s I singlehandedly crashed the Kodak.com homepage and took it offline at 5:45pm on a summer Friday after most of the tech folks had gone home… wait, don’t bother, that’s pretty much the entire story.
***—For the time being there will be no visual or performance change between the old and new server. James and I decided to handle the migration before diving into some ongoing issues like the moderation problem some of you keep having.
