Why we still call it 'beta'

For those of you who have been with us for a few weeks, you may have noticed that we are continually making changes and improvments. Some are visually quite obvious (like our new forum layout), and others are more subtle.

We moved into dedicated hosting in mid November, just about a month ago. Our new hosting company is really on top of their game, unlike our previous one that took weeks to fail to resolve a significant configuration problem on the server that housed folkjam.org. But we are not immune to growing pains.

Last night was especially bad for us. We took the site offline on purpose for a memory upgrade and to upgrade core components of the system that cannot be done live, such operating system patches and a new database server version. That all came back up just fine and we called it a night.

Unfortunatly shortly after Shawn and I both signed off last night folkjam.org was attacked, as web sites frequently are. We are hit with denial of service (DOS) attacks and people trying to break in almost daily, and our hosting provider does a great job of protecting us. Last night, however, something got in just far enough to lock up our server, but not far enough to do anything else. The net result: our site was down from 11:06pm US Central time through 9:45am US Central time, about an hour after we first detected that the site was down and called for help.

Under the covers folkjam.org is a fairly complex site. We are much better off this month than we were the month before in terms of our infrastructure, but we know we can still make it even better with redundant servers so that one can step up when another fails. All of this takes quite a bit to keep going financially, so we are taking it at the speed our wives will let us invest in it. :)

Our apologies for last nights outage. Nobody is more upset about it than we are, but we also know that DOS and break-in attacks are to be expected. We are just sad that we didn't resist this one.

Thanks John (you know who you are) for all your help in keeping folkjam.org running smoothly.

Scott
Chief Fiddling Officer
www.folkjam.org