Surprise! New Server

As of this morning, we have officially migrated to new server hardware. We attempted to do so with as little service disruption as possible, taking the sites down for about 1 hour this morning; however, some users may have noticed various services being unavailable at various times and for various lengths since the beginning of the weekend. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Leading up to our recent relaunch, we quickly became aware that we were pressing the limits of our server's processing capabilities, but we made it through launch, so our processing demand did mostly subside. But unfortunately we also filled the server's hard drives to capacity, leaving little room for any of the future content we had planned.

So we took a bit of a detour from our roadmap this past week and went ahead and moved everything to a new server, with significantly more processing power and disk space.

If users are going to see any difference, it will likely be in load times. In the basic comparisons we have done from our offices, we have seen pages loading over 50% faster, with most of that being latency and download time. Not counting that, the server seems to generate responses anywhere from 80-90% faster, depending on the metric used.

Since this is a different system, some services may still need tweaking for everything to work normally again. Overall we are pleased with the migration so far, and we look forward to the great content it will allow us to bring you. For now, we hope you enjoy the improved responsiveness of the site.