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- Jan 14, 2008
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O-F Staff is pleased to announce that Orbiter-Forum.com and Orbit-Hangar.com will be switching to a new cloud provider, Digital Ocean, soon. The integration between Orbiter-Forum.com and Orbit-Hangar.com will remain and the forum software and database will remain the same. Xyon is heading up the changeover and is the main administrator managing the server, although all administrators have access and can help out. The main reasons for the switchover are:
A week ago Vash uploaded the VBulletin forum code along with a snapshot of the Orbiter-Forum database to the new cloud provider for testing purposes and Xyon has the new Orbiter-Forum instance up and running on the Digital Ocean server here. Please log in to the new site and try it out -- we want to give the new instance a proper beta-test before we do the changeover. You should be able to log in using your existing Orbiter-Forum account and password. Regarding Orbit-Hangar, Vash is still working on copying that over to the new cloud server and so there is no Orbit-Hangar test instance available yet.
There will be a separate announcement in red at the top of the forum for at least a few days before the switchover occurs. When the switchover happens, Orbiter-Forum and Orbit-Hangar will be offline for few hours while the changeover is made and the DNS records are updated to point to the new server. Vash will keep the old server on standby for a week or so after the changeover in case we need to switch back for some reason.
Note: please report any issues you have in this thread on Orbiter-Forum.com and not in the new forum on Digital Ocean: the O-F database on the new server will be replaced when we do the changeover and so any posts or changes you make in the new forum will be lost when that occurs.
Thanks for your help testing! :tiphat:
- The ability for redundant, three-box failover. [This will happen sometime after the switchover and we're sure everything is working first. Initially the new forum will be running on a single server in New York, USA.]
- The ability to perform server-breaking updates without taking the site down.
- Better performance from the forum itself (theoretically shorter response times to requests)
- Geographically distributed servers with latency-based routing (which should provide a more even site experience worldwide; this will happen when we set up three-box failover)
- Multiple administrators with the capacity to fix things should they go wrong.
- Regular, simple server snapshotted backups with quick restoration capabilities.
A week ago Vash uploaded the VBulletin forum code along with a snapshot of the Orbiter-Forum database to the new cloud provider for testing purposes and Xyon has the new Orbiter-Forum instance up and running on the Digital Ocean server here. Please log in to the new site and try it out -- we want to give the new instance a proper beta-test before we do the changeover. You should be able to log in using your existing Orbiter-Forum account and password. Regarding Orbit-Hangar, Vash is still working on copying that over to the new cloud server and so there is no Orbit-Hangar test instance available yet.
There will be a separate announcement in red at the top of the forum for at least a few days before the switchover occurs. When the switchover happens, Orbiter-Forum and Orbit-Hangar will be offline for few hours while the changeover is made and the DNS records are updated to point to the new server. Vash will keep the old server on standby for a week or so after the changeover in case we need to switch back for some reason.
Note: please report any issues you have in this thread on Orbiter-Forum.com and not in the new forum on Digital Ocean: the O-F database on the new server will be replaced when we do the changeover and so any posts or changes you make in the new forum will be lost when that occurs.
Thanks for your help testing! :tiphat: