Hi everyone,
I would like to say a big thank you, to all our members who have taken out a Premium Membership.
We really didn't expect many until the first of the "trial memberships" expire in April, and when the changes take effect for the majority of our members in July.
The show of support has been very heartwarming.
This has allowed us to start upgrading the site.
The first upgrade happened yesterday. We have been struggling along on a free version of MS SQL server, for many years, and the forums were starting to run at a crawl. This has been resolved by upgrading the software to the commercial version. I hope you notice a marked improvement. The forums are pretty much instantaneous for me.
Next on the list, is a new database server or two, which will share the load of our core site database. How we do this is currently being looked into, as "you would normally have a minimum of 3 servers participating in sharding / replication". We will have to see what kind of deal our host can put on the table.
All of our servers are now on a host managed basis, so hopefully downtime will be significantly reduced.
More updates to follow as they happen.
Thank you!
Nicola