Greetings and Salutations -

If you're a Facebook friend of mine, you might have seen some of my saga today :). BellaOnline runs on three servers. Two of those servers are nearing their 10th birthday. This is great for kids - not so great for computer hardware. The only reason the third server (our radio server) is an infant is that its previous incarnation catastrophically died last September due to old age :). That doesn't bode well for the other two.

I've been negotiating for months with our hosting company to get us onto new servers. We've been a loyal, good-reference-supplying customer for a decade. We've paid for those servers many times over at this point. The real issue is our old, great account rep left and the new one seems money-hungry. He's pushing hard for us to move into the cloud and pay them more money for that privilege. I feel strongly that the safety of our information on our servers needs to stay on our own, private, dedicated machines. I don't want any of the email addresses or other info we are entrusted with to be in any shared environment.

I nearly threw in the towel with them today, but it seems we might have found a workable solution that gets us off these ancient machines and also preserves us in a dedicated environment. As I mentioned, I take our privacy concerns very seriously. I want our servers to be sturdy and safe. We owe it to our visitors and to ourselves.

I will keep you updated. When we are ready to do the transfer, I'll work on the forum-mail server first. That server has only the forum and mail system on it, but NOT our actual "website" with your admin area or visitor content or so on. The forum-mail server and the content-server are two entirely separate servers. Once we are sure the forum-mail system is moved and working and all set, then we'll tackle the larger move of the main system.

I will definitely be alerting you step-by-step as both of these occur so you know exactly where we are in the process.

The new systems will be faster and sturdier. So that definitely is a good thing. And then we'll be set for another ten years :).

Let me know if you have any questions!

Sincerely,


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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