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Servers Upgraded and Site Enhancements

Early this past Monday we successfully migrated WP to new server hardware. The reason for our migration is to handle the growth we are being blessed with. For those curious about the technical details of our setup, be sure to read the section further down in this blog.

We also applied a few new helpful features while we did the migration. First, when you click on a song title in the site you’ll see a “Songs Menu” with some general info about the song (including the most recent performance date), as well as several links to access details about the song. Also, our song details pages have been given a nice face-lift.

As another enhancement, we added a Location filter to the “Services” section of the Home page. That filter setting is stored on your computer for the next time you access the page.

Hardware Migration Technical Details Our main application hosting company, Rackspace, has been fantastic. So when we planned this migration, we didn’t even consider changing to anyone else. WP currently has severs at two other data centers in different areas of the country for business contingency (disaster recovery) purposes.

Our hardware upgrade had three main goals: 1) Give the database its own, high-power server. 2) Beef-up the main application server. 3) Implement a better firewall solution. This configuration also will allow us to handle future growth by simply adding additional application servers to share the load (with the use of a content switch).

The database is (as it has been in the past) backed up on a daily basis and copied to one of our remote servers. In the event of a catastrophe at the Rackspace datacenter, traffic to worshipPlanning.com could be redirected (in a matter of minutes) to the back-up server. But let’s pray we never need to use that option.