KRISISDnB V3 - THE MIGRATION STORY.....

Well.. time for a quick update I think...

KRISISDnB V3 went live at 2am on Saturday 26th September after a cutover that took 10mins to perform. A few minor problems with content and small site adjustments to get things as we wanted but it was performing fine. Both NeO and myself kept an eye on things and started thinking about the adjustments in layout or developments that could be made instantly, well after the immediate issues that we found.

By well before lunchtime we were seeing so many additional hits on the site as people were clearly aware that we were cutting over today. 100-200 concurrent users all searching through the site and shop it was amazing to watch.

IStandard was ready to go for the first live show on the V3 site at 2pm, and he had a substantial amount of listeners locked on and in the chatroom. NeO and myself were busy setting up all of the DJs still to play on saturday and sunday. Not an easy task for some, but we managed.

Things quietened down a bit in the evening which was good as both NeO and myself were getting so tired my eyes were blurred from staring at the screen all day.

That calm evening was about to be blown away however..... Around 11pm saturday night I was in the process of setting up ESR to give him his DJ access on the site, when he said he wasnt able to get to the site. Sure enough i got the same error message, and NeO had spotted it as well, so we raised a support call with our hosts. The long and the short of the story was that the website was utilising around 90% capacity of the shared hosting server we were on. This was due to the large number of visitors to the website all day.

NeO and myself were surprised by the impact that V3 had had during the day, but we had never thought that we would hit any sort of capacity issue. The hosts had assured us that they were confident that the website would be fine. So this was a real kick in the bollocks to us. What made it worse was that they had given us absolutely no warning even though there email said they 'actively and proactively monitor' usage on all of there servers. It was clear that we needed a different solution right now. NeO was thinking fast and had a temporary holding page up on the V2 host site explaining the problem.

After a lot of emails and discussions between us and the hosts, we took the step to purchase our own dedicated server as it was already clear that V3 was such a step forward in terms of flexibility, layout, and performance. What should have been a 1hr cutover and migration has been extended due to us moving over a weekend meaning that our new host had limited resource.

We agreed that the V2 site should not be reinstated even though it was perfectly possible to do so. It would feel like such a let down to NeO and myself if we did that. The launch show WOULD go ahead as planned on Sunday afternoon, and as listener figures were proving, the temporary page did exactly what it needed and the masses of loyal supporters that KRISISDnB has was overwhelming.

The V3 launch show was a fantastic show and have to say a massive big ups to DJ SONNA from Federation S Records who alongside MC SKAZE, Kendall, Shakey, Gambit who were all superb.

Its tuesday morning and were still in a wounded state waiting for DNS to propogate around the net to get our new server up and running. We think everything is ready to go but its so annoying just waiting for something to happen. However when it does then the mayhem of continuing setting up all the rest of the DJs on the station will continue, as well as tweaking the site to work as we want it to.