**Update 1st September**
Due to a technical delay, the planned update to servers did not go ahead last Friday and will instead take place between the hours of midnight Friday 5th September and 8.00 am on Saturday 6th September.
**Update 1st September**
Over the weekend of the 30th August, we'll be making the latest in a long line of improvements to the multi-million pound infrastructure and systems that serve the Justgiving website. We're upgrading to brand new, state-of-the-art servers (the seriously powerful computers that run the website) and moving to a new hosting environment, Qube (the people who host and services those computers).
When is it taking place?
In order to make the move, the Justgiving site will be unavailable between the hours of midnight Friday 29th August, and 8.00 am on Saturday 30th August.
This is just like our normal scheduled maintenance periods where anyone visiting the site will be shown a holding page and will be unable to create a fundraising page or make a donation.
What does this mean?
It should make the site much faster than it is now, with fundraising pages downloading much more quickly, searches taking less time and a better overall performance.
This also paves the way for us to have a dedicated server that's only used to power charity reporting (to go with the recent changes that made reporting faster and minimised its effect on the rest of the website). So when you create and download a huge report in the future, it won't affect the site.
Think of it in terms of the website being like the old DeLorean (of Back to the future fame) at the moment, and the improvements making it like the rumoured new DeLorean, complete with a spare 'flux capacitor' that will kick in seamlessly if the first breaks:
You see, not only is the 'engine' that powers the site going to be a lot better, we'll also have a spare 'engine' that will start up in the unlikely event of the first one not working - meaning the site will be much more robust and reliable, as well as speedier.
We moved our sister site, firstgiving.com, to this new provider over a month ago, and they have experienced a great improvement in the site. We're hoping for much of the same.
The *techy* details...
Just in case any web systems or operations people are reading this, here's what our new hardware includes:
- Two new database clusters – each consisting of two Quad Core Xeon machines with 8GB apiece, full network and power redundancy and 64-bit throughout
- Two new SAN (storage area network) – providing 1.5 Terabytes of RAID storage each
- All new web servers, load balancers, firewalls, mail relays, IDS...
All impressive sounding stuff, even if I don't have a clue what most of them are. Suffice to say, running a website like ours and making it look simple on the front end is a *lot* more complicated than you might think...
So, thanks to our Operations Manager Charlie for providing the details and managing the project - see him below receiving a well deserved cake for last month's 'Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day'...
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