DRD Team is moving, yet again.

[Rachael]

Sometime within the next week or two, DRD Team is going to be moving to a new home. During this move, all hostee and FTP accounts will be disabled, and the site may be unavailable for 24 hours or more.

I find that now, neither of my hosting companies offer what this site really need, and as such, I have found a better one.

The process of doing backups has already begun, and I hope to have all of my ancillary data off the sites and onto my local drive, before I move all the primary data to the new location.

[Tormentor667]

Good luck with the new one, DRDTeam definitely deserves a better host!

[wildweasel]

Well, I'll give the current host one thing: it didn't have as much ridiculous downtime as the previous one!

[Rachael]

Well, guess what. The current host just isn't working out. Fatcow has let me down again and again and again - it's got some great features but the reliability is utter shit. Unlike other shared hosts, ALL of their sites are not only on one host, but on one IP! Can you believe that 65.254.254.34 is the IP address for every FatCow site in existence?

I can't stand it anymore, and I suppose if I have to keep moving this site until it finds a good home, I just hope I don't waste a lot of money doing so.

It isn't final the new host yet, but I know I'm definitely not happy with the current one.

[Enjay]

That's a real shame given that moving it around is quite an undertaking. I have to agree though that access generally has been a bit lumpy* since the move.

*I don't really know how else to describe it. It has rarely actually failed (other then the FTP issues that I reported to you) but access to the forum and sites just doesn't seem as smooth as it should be some of the time.

[Rachael]

Apparently it's the SQL server. The support team is quite unhelpful though.

They told me I have to optimize my tables every once in a while in order for load times to be fast. (No shit?) Anyway I never needed to do that on the old host (even though I did), and access times were bad but were never this bad. I think the highest load time for this site on FatCow so far is 40 seconds. This is far from acceptable, and it appears to happen frequently between 1-4pm EST.

[baghead]

These guys are running a great deal on business-class shared hosting: http://www.midphase.com/website-hosting/

edit - reading it more carefully, it looks like the discounts only last for three months... that's long enough to try them out, though.

[Rachael]

I'm trying to see if there's any possible way to avoid shared hosting completely. I've been looking at VPS, but it's a little out of my budget right now. But I will definitely look into it.

[Rachael]

The move is now final and will take place "as soon as possible." Hopefully it won't take long to transfer all the data off of FatCow's servers and onto the new host. I am going to try and make the switch as transparent as possible - with the VPS configuration it will be possible for me to keep all present FTP accounts with the same logins. However, they will be frozen again on the old host after the data is transferred, and I will be mirroring new data quickly.

There might be a momentary lapse in connectivity as the DNS system propagates the new IP address.

[Enjay]

Well, again, good luck with it. I hope that it all goes smoothly.

[Rachael]

Again, thanks, Enjay.

[Rachael]

As some of you may already know, DRD Team moved to Linode recently. Because both hosts were VPS-based, the move went very smoothly, and I was able to transfer most things directly instead of muddling with scripts to try and get everything working.

I also spent some time to try and fix some dead-route issues post-move - everyone (including the southeastern-southcentral United States) should be able to access the site now.

Additionally, email should be fixed. (Again)

If there are any issues, please contact me.