We’re Moved! (And Burst.net can bite me!)

Update Wednesday, April 23rd at 8:30 AM: I’ve been working on the new site set-up. Although things are running pretty well, a few more tweaks should get it running better. I’m also prepping stuff for an upgrade of the site’s underlying CMS. At the same time I’ve been working on the new member group that I set up for contributors. At this point I need to start manually linking member accounts with Paypal. When that’s done I will also need to work on automating that process, although that will have to wait until the CMS is updated and the site is running to my satisfaction. Thanks again for your patience.

Update Thursday, April 17th at 11:00 AM: I’ve been bogged down looking for a fix to a domain redirect issue caused by a new php handler that I’m using on the server. For now using some of the old domain names will produce an error if you try to go to a sub-directory (like www.baseballprimer.com/newsstand/). I’ve decided to put off fixing this until later so I can get to some other things on my to-do list. At the moment I’m working on removing ads for people who’ve donated. With the way I have ads called in the old templates, it’s proving to be be a little time consuming. When I get this task done I’ll start moving people into the new member group I’ve set up to trigger the change. This will be time consuming as well as I will need to manually associate the donations with the accounts. Eventually I will automate the process but, for now, I’d appreciate your patience if it takes a few days to get rid of the ads on your account.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 7:30 PM: Got a bunch of things done today. Except when I hosed the web server for a few minutes, things have gone pretty well. I’m still not happy with the way things are running but my mind is fried so it will have to wait until tomorrow. Thanks again for the donations. It’s very much appreciated. Assuming I get things running a little better tomorrow, I will start setting things up for those of you who donated. Hopefully, you can start viewing the site without ads by the weekend.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 1 PM: Things seems seem to be running OK after a few tweaks. There is still work to be done squishing a few bugs (redirects are wonky once in a while). The site also needs some more performance tweaking. Those things will have to wait until a little later, however, because I need to get a little sleep before I make a really stupid mistake.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 7:30 AM: The site is moved over to its new host. I have a lot of work to do getting the servers optimized. Please bear with me.

Update Monday, April 14th at 3:50 PM: I will be taking the old server off-line tonight between 3-4 AM to finish moving things over to the new server. There should be only a few hours of downtime but it might take longer for certain DNS server.

Update Sunday, April 13 at 7:30 PM: New server set up. DNS redundancy added. Extra domains moved over.Tweaking and testing tomorrow. One day ahead of schedule. Beverage time and GOT time.

I am moving the site to a new server host this week. On March 28th my server host, burst.net, disconnected my servers from their data center in Scranton PA, put them on truck, and took them to another data center in North Carolina. I was not given any notification prior to the move even though the move was planned in advance. During the downtime they did not reply to any tickets and, instead, provided an automated response that they were migrating servers. At the same time, they have been trying to charge my account for next month’s bill weeks before the due date. (Luckily I only transfer money into this account when I am ready to make a payment.) This simply is not acceptable, so I am moving the site.

I have taken a week’s vacation from my regular job to get this done. The tentative plan is to switch the site over on Tuesday night on April 15th or Wednesday night on April 16th, depending on my progress. Although I’m working to minimize the downtime and prevent avoidable problems, there may be times the site will be down. I will post updates on this thread, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

I apologize for the downtime and the inconvenience.