Our coding team has a two-fold plan for the improvement of the Neowin website. It will address both the reliability and the speed of our servers.
1) Reliability: We already have two web servers that use load balancing to improve performance. While we are happy with our web-based performance we would like to improve the reliability by making each server more independent of each other. This will hopefully be apparent if one server is experiencing problems or a denial of service attack.
2) Performance: We would like to address our MySQL performance by re-implementing replication. In order to eliminate the delays we plan to implement a more conservative approach this time around.
We expect a minimum downtime of four hours plus some potential hiccups for a few days while we iron out any bugs. The downtime is scheduled to take place on Friday, September 29th, 2006.
Please note: The downtime does not include a front-end update. PR8 is ready but we want to see if the server changes are successful before we implement the front-end upgrade, which will take place shortly afterwards should everything go ok and to plan.
Again, we thank you for your patience in this matter. Hopefully the site will return faster and better. Personally, I advise you to cram in all the Neowin you can handle until the work actually begins.