This week, we’ve invested in upgrading our server infrastructure. First, we needed to figure out what we needed, and compared that against what we were willing to pay for. We’ve decided to go with a solution that doubles our processing power, adds 50% more disk space for more podcasts and music, and also comes with a 10x increase in bandwidth to support more listeners of the station and our podcasts.
This is quite exciting, but it has also come with some speed bumps. We decided to split our mail server away from the primary server. However, at the time of writing, the IP address assigned to the new mail server is blocked, or mail is rejected, by several common mail providers (gmail, yahoo, etc). We have an active ticket to resolve this issue. This affects delivery of all of our emails (we can still receive emails), so services such as user registration confirmation (account creation is still working), password recovery, etc. will be unavailable until this is fixed.
Additionally, users should expect some relatively brief service outages (web and station) over the next few days as we migrate systems to the new server. Listeners that use playlist files should be able to use what they already have, but older playlist files may require listeners to re-download them from our website.
In short, it’s been a very technically-focused week, but the goal is to reduce or eliminate the load issues we’ve been seeing over the last few weeks by throwing cold hard cash at the problem (and optimizing some of our processes like separating mail from everything else). That said, we still have pins, shirts, buttons, and stickers over on our website if you’d like to support. Thanks for your consideration, and thanks for listening!
[Knowledge #15]