Server Updates & Migration

The server administrator (aka Dan) has been in his element recently with upgrades to our US server and a full migration of our Canadian server. This is typically an exciting time for Dan as he gets to "geek-out", improving server performance and upgrading to the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Terms Support) while I'm in the background completly useless becoming a nagging nelly fretting over back-ups and potential downtime. The transition is done and all is well so I'll pass it over to Dan to give you the juicy details!

Dan here... it's been great to have the opportunity to dive back into server administration and data migrations!

For the clients we host, we manage 2 Virtual Private Servers - one in Fremont California, and the other in Vancouver BC. I'll provide a few details regarding the upgrades to the Fremont server first.

The data provider we provisioned our VPS from recently moved their servers into a new data center. At this time we were able to double the amount of disk space as well as increase the monthly bandwidth by a factor of 10. The most noticable change however was doubling the RAM available to the server. This allows the server to keep more of the sites' information stored in memory providing shorter page load times.

For our Canadian server, we migrated to a new physical host. At this time we took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest Long Term Support release of Ubuntu (currently 12.04). On this server we now have triple the amount of RAM we previously had which allows us to run a more varied set of software without impacting the overall performance of the server.

All in all it has been an exciting couple of weeks from a technical stand-point. The end results have been great, and our clients should notice even snappier websites for their visitors!