Upcoming Maintenance: Thanksgiving Weekend 2023

Update: We’ll be working on the website and new server all weekend, but you may not even notice!

For the TL;DR crowd, scroll down to the bottom.

Some of you might recognize the photo associated with this notice from our maintenance page when we moved from SurveyorConnect to RPLS.com. Well, we certainly did have lift-off, but not without our share of issues. We lost an engine, and the other engine was rattling around a bit, yet still operational. And then there was that fire in cockpit. There were lots of spilled drinks, too.

Fortunately, these issues have been learning experiences for us — what with the new branding, entirely new website, new software, and new server — and the time since launch has certainly brought many opportunities to learn.

Since the launch, we’ve been tweaking the server, sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad results. And you pretty much have to make changes and then wait and watch what happens. But, at the end of the day, we better understand the needs of the website.

Through it all, and when the server is running decently, we are seeing traffic numbers that are considerably higher than the old SurveyorConnect website. Somewhere in the vicinity of 30% more traffic during those times. As you can see, not only did we have to deal with all the new stuff mentioned above, but we are also dealing with an unexpected influx of traffic. I really didn’t think that rebranding to RPLS.com would have that kind of impact — but apparently it has. What’s really interesting is that I thought our current server was overkill.

Sometime over Thanksgiving Weekend 2023, we’ll be moving this website (yes, again) to a new server that is being built based on what we’ve learned. This server will be five times more powerful than the current server in terms of computing power and will be preset with everything we’ve learned. And then some. The new server will have room for significant growth.

I don’t have an exact time when we’ll start the migration process. But it actually won’t take that long, if all goes as planned. The website will go into maintenance mode and then will return when it’s up and running on the new server. During the following week, we’ll keep an eye on things and make adjustments as needed.

TL;DR

This website will be down for at least a couple of hours sometime over the 2023 Thanksgiving weekend during evening hours in order to migrate it to a new server.