Major Server Upgrade Announcement

We’re going to be performing a major server upgrade today, that will hopefully handle the expected increases in load that we’ve been seeing. We will be upgrading to fully-dedicated hosting on a brand new server. The underlying software won’t change however, so you’re just going to see a massive performance boost.

What is the new server? Well, if you want the specs, we’re running a dual-core Pentium 4 @ 2.80 GHz (that’s 5.6 GHz of total power if you don’t want to do the math).

You want more specs? Okay, we’re now powered with 2 GB of RAM, and a performance-mirrored RAID 10 array of four 150 GB hard drives (300 GB of dual-SATA storage with 300 GB of mirrored backup).

And no, this is not a “dedicated server with a cluster of sites”. While we are running a few test accounts on the server as well… all this expansion is just to handle the massive surge of PhoneNews.com… and PhoneNews.com alone. So, if you were confused about our viewership, the three-figure hosting bills each month don’t lie. No downtime will take place for this switch… it should happen without you noticing anything (except everything getting faster, of course).

And, while we are pulling more out of our pockets each month for the upgrade (more than double, actually) we thank you for making this possible. Three figure hosting bills are nothing in comparison to the daily seven-figure hit counts that make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Just to be on the safe side though, giveaways will resume Friday afternoon, we don’t want a single entry to possibly get lost (though that shouldn’t happen anyways).