The site has been succesfully swapped onto the new server in an 8 hour extravaganze last night (March9th/10th). If you find any bugs, let us know. Otherwise, enjoy the blistering speed of the new and improved Newschoolers.com setup.

If you've been on Newschoolers at all in the past couple of months, you'll definitely have noticed how slow it is during peak times. Since January, Newschoolers has received an influx of traffic, pushing our unique visitors to 50,000-60,000 a month, from 30,000 in December.

Our current server just can't handle that much traffic, so we bought a new one.

One of these servers is ours.

The new server can handle twice as much bandwidth, and is many, many times faster, which means the site should be as fast at 8pm on a Tuesday as it is at 4am on a Sunday.

Paying for it:

BUT, of course this new server costs way more money. Which is where we need your help. The server will run several thousand dollars a year. If 10% of the members donated $10, then we could afford the server for several years. So if you use the site a lot, and reap its benefits, we encourage you to help us out, and click here to read more about donating.

This server change marks the fifth upgrade in as many years for Newschoolers.com. We started on a hacked free server, which allowed us 500 megs of bandwidth a month. We now use that much bandwidth in less than an hour.

Important:

We can't just flip a switch and have the site running off the new server. Therefore, we are planning a two-day switch-over period on March 13th and 14th. You will still be able to access your NS e-mail account, but all other features will be turned off.

After that two day period, another two or three days could be needed for server settings to propogate over the Internet. Over the course of these couple of days, e-mail service might not run perfectly. If you are expecting important e-mails during that time, please attempt to re-schedule delivery.

Tech Specs:

Our current server is:

Intel Celeron 1.3 gig

512 megs of ram

40 gig ide hard drive

700 gigs of bandwidth

Our new server is:

Intel Dual Xeon 2.4 gig

2 gigs of ram

2 73 gig scsi hard drives

1400 gigs of bandwidth