the time has nearly come for Mizahar to switch to a more powerful server. I plan on transferring the site to our new virtual dedicated server on Saturday, February 27, around 3 PM (GMT+1, that would be 6-9 AM in the US or the evening for our Asian players). The expected downtime is about 2 hours to move the files and databases, plus the time required to propagate the domain change over the Internet. This can take as little as 2 hours and will generally be done within 24 hours, though it is entirely outside our control. The new server will be accessible through its IP address until that time, though, if you really are that addicted to Mizahar.
We are extremely happy with the player base we have managed to attract over a scant six months, but there have been reports of the site struggling to keep up on some busy days. All in all, our ISP has been performing very well and with virtually no downtime since we opened, but shared hosting solutions aren't really targeted at forums past a certain activity threshold. Currently, we have a database quota that's filling up day after day. Moving is a necessity, and while it was not an immediate one, we considered that the longer we waited, the more painful it'd be to move.
I always thought that when we did move, it would be to a higher class of hosting. The new server is faster (and the wiki is especially faster) and should be able to accommodate a five-fold increase in our player base or more. Moreover, Google is starting to reward faster sites with higher positions in the search results, and having our own IP address means more credibility with the search engines. It also gives me the freedom to install anything on the server to provide a better service to our users. I am very excited about this, and very thankful to our community for making us successful enough to require a move in the first place!
The move should be entirely transparent to the players, but I recommend saving all your posts to an external text editor as the time of the move approaches.
