Wikidot moving 1,000 miles NE next week

by michal-frackowiak on 30 Aug 2012 12:28

Hi Wikidot folks,

we would like to inform you that next week,

Monday to Wednesday (3—5 September)

we will be performing a major re-configuration of our servers behind Wikidot.com. All our servers and services will be migrated to a different location and a different provider, namely to Amazon Web Services in Virginia, which is about 1,000 miles North-East from our current location, Dallas TX.

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No worries. Although it is a huge operation we have been planning it ahead in much detail. We expect no interruption to Wikidot.com services and no sites hosted at Wikidot should be affected. We cannot rule out unforeseen issues with an operation so complex, but we will be there to fix them ASAP.

One thing will however change and it will require your attention: static IP addresses for custom domains. If any of your Wikidot sites use "A" records on your DNS servers, you will need to update these records. But do not worry — we will email admins of all affected sites with detailed instructions and we will provide a reasonable transition period.

In the long term this change will help us easier maintain our resources, and should leave us more time to do the cool stuff we all want at Wikidot. Not to mention we expect better reliability and performance from the new setup so that your sites would be served better.

For these interested: we are moving to a configuration with approximately 25-30 CPU cores, 125-130 GB memory and 1.5 TB of fast disk space on 16-20 provisioned servers, all managed with the awesome Chef software. Plus, there are 6 external services we heavy rely on. We will also utilize all sorts of goodies like automatic resource provisioning, multi-level redundancy, load-balancing, monitoring, auto-scaling and so on. My colleagues tell me it is a state-of-art and bulletproof configuration that will perfectly suit Wikidot, so let us see!

PS. All critical data is already being replicated live to the new location, so the process has started and is going very well. We will keep you informed about the progress.

Image by PhilipC. No, we are not moving any hardware either by train or any other means. We always rent servers, this way we stay flexible :-)

UPDATE (Tue, 8:59 UTC): We have just moved. Uploaded files were unavailable for a short while and we are still bringing some functionality back. Activities are still not up-to-date and site statistics (the Pro feature). But other than that, things are running pretty smoothly.

UPDATE (Tue, 10:21 UTC): We are still working on improving performance and making all translations work for your sites.

UPDATE (Tue, 12.00 UTC): It looks like all major problems has been resolved. The whole operation went smoothly. I hope most of you did not even notice the transition :-)

UPDATE (Tue, 15:36 UTC): The transition went pretty smoothly. The last remaining piece, the traffic statc for Pro accounts, will be brought on-line tomorrow. Sorry about it, but I highly appreciate your patience!

UPDATE (Fri, 14:29 UTC): It has been a touch week, but we have solved almost all issues. The transition resulted in a few unexpected problems, but thanks to you they have been all traced back and solved. Wikidot is considerably faster now and (as we believe) more stable. Thanks for your patience!

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