As most of you probably experienced today, we ran into server issues with IP Board. IP Board sets limits on the amount of simultaneous server activity that is permissible based on the account type you have.
Back on January 24th, when I signed up for IP Board, I selected their lowest hosting package. As popularity in S4GRU grew, we were "automatically upgraded" to higher and higher hosting plans. S4GRU is now so popular, we are on an Advanced hosting plan. Advanced hosting plans come with dedicated servers. However, unbeknownst to me, I have to ask IP Board to migrate us to the new higher performance servers that we are paying for.
Today, the consequence of my inaction was discovered. Since we were on the economy "shared" servers, we were consistently exceeding our maximum allowable simultaneous usage limits, and IP Board kept taking us offline. It took a few hours for IP Board to discover the problem. They initially thought it was caused by aggressive indexing bots.
After discovering that we needed to migrate to new servers, I went ahead and pulled the trigger. It takes a few hours to migrate our site over to our new higher performance servers and for the DNS caching to catch up, so normally that would have been done after hours to impact the least amount of users. However, in this instance, our site kept going down. So I asked them to do it immediately and get it over with. This way we would be back online through the prime evening hours tonight.
I apologize for the inconvenience. But as long as we allow the site to grow, there will be growing pains, like this one. Thanks for your patience during this ordeal.
Robert
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