Growth is a good thing

VistaDB has more than doubled in downloads over the past year.  This has meant a strain on our servers and download procedures as we continue to grow.  In an effort to get ahead of the curve a bit we are performing a major upgrade over the next few weeks.

There may be brief interruptions in the website, download services, email, and fogbugz during this period.

Dual core to 8 core

We will now be running on an 8 core XEON box (2 quad core CPUs).  Wow, that just amazes me still that you can even buy that off the shelf today.

download.VistaDB.Net

The download server is splitting out from the main website to it's own site as well.  This will hopefully allow us to load balance the download portion of the site better resulting in less problems during peak times.  The VistaDB Express Edition has generated a lot of new traffic (that is a good thing).

We have been serving the trial from the download site for quite some time, but the main downloads will be moving over to that site as well.

FogBugz split out

One of the most heavily utilized apps on the old server is Fogbugz.  Since Fogbugz uses SQL Server that is the primary source of the load, but it still can impact the downloads on the current site during peak times.

Forums - not yet

As much as I would love to move the forums away from PHPBB we can't do it yet.  It is a drain on the current server, but moving all the information over is just not possible at this time.

New Store

The new store will also be split from the main site to further help load. SSL can be a drain on IIS in some cases, and the store has to be SSL enabled.  We have put Intel Ether Express cards with hardware SSL decoding to help (although the dual quad should be able to handle it with no problems). 

Infrastructure for growth

This is all to say we are expanding our infrastructure for growth, and growth is a good thing.  Thanks to all of you for your support and understanding while we put these upgrades into place.