As all of you know, Straferight likes to ensure that its users get the best possible experience across all our mediums (Game Servers, Ventrilo Servers, Website, etc)...
Therefore during the second week of July we are planning some very aggressive maintenance, optimizations, and work to the back-end of the Straferight.com website. More specifically, We plan to move our website to a VPS (Virtual private server). This change gives us serious options as to where we as a community take Straferight.com next.
While users will not notice any visual changes, a significant increase in our websites performance should be seen. While it is impossible to predict the immediate performance gains, we do expect them to be very noticeable (especially when search engines crawl our site). In addition, in the weeks following these changes, we have plans to make changes to increase performance even further.
Unfortunately, because of how complex much of our site is, we will not be able to just make the move in one day with out causing massive downtime. We plan to minimize downtime by spreading the maintenance over a couple of days.
So, here is our maintenance schedule...
Maintenance Schedule: July 7th, 2008: Between 10:00PM and 1:00AM PST we will start our initial maintenance. This includes making several initial backups of the website & its databases. The website should not be down for this entire time, however users will notice the site crawling during this time.
July 8th, 2008: (UPDATE: We will make another attempt at a backup tonight starting at around 8:30pm PST) We will be be testing certain changes on a remote server so that users on Straferight.com will not be affected by anything we will be working on.
July 9th, 2008: (UPDATE: Due to a few complications we were unable to test the site on the new server as long as we would have liked... It does however appear to be operational... We plan to make the DNS server changes so that the move will be final. When that happens there is a chance that for a certain period of time the site will be inaccessible. Also keep in mind that when the move is complete there is a chance that certain things around the site may not work. Please remain in your seats if this does happen while we address the issues 
...) We will continue testing changes on our remote server. We are assuming we will run into problems on July 8th, 2008 so this time will probably be used to work out any bugs...
July 10th, 2008: Assuming that we finish all necessary changes July 8th & 9th, 2008 we will switch over to our database server on our remote server. This will require us to take down the website long enough to backup, transfer, and restore our database. I cannot set an exact time for this to happen but I hope it will be sometime in the morning...
A couple of hours after we are sure the database side of things is working, we will transfer our files to our new web server & make our final DNS changes...
During the time the DNS changes are taking place, there is up to a 48 hour period where you may not be able to access the site. However if you live in North America, you will probably notice very little downtime.
Note: This is a tentative maintenance schedule and is subject to changes. We will however do our very best to ensure that we keep it up-to-date.
Good luck with everything, and thanks for continuing to make StrafeRight better!
Well, its not that you break things... There are just some issues that can be difficult to track down... 
