If you remember during last year's raffle, we moved to a dedicated server. It seemed large and huge at the time - a 3800+ dual core server with 2GB of RAM. A few months ago, we had to upgrade the RAM to 3GB. Not a big deal, we expected we'd need to have more member eventually, and our estimates for the third GB were pretty close to when we actually needed it.

As those of you who surf late at night are aware, over the last few months, the forum has been slowing down (and occasionally locking up) during our nightly backup, and we've locked up during the day a few times. The technical support staff at LiquidWeb, our host, recommended that we upgrade the RAM.

After considering our options, we ultimately decided to do a major server upgrade. Because Liquidweb is having a large sale on their top-of-the-line machines, and we were willing to do some modifications to our setup (namely, eliminate our RAID set up), it was cheaper to do the upgrade ($5/mo) than to add another stick of RAM ($20/mo). The biggest reason to do this instead of just another stick of RAM is that 4GB maxes out our current server's RAM capabilities. (The extra processing power certainly didn't hurt!) After that, we'd have to build a new server - and the prices wouldn't necessarily be as advantageous then and it could cost as much as $1,200/yr more.

Anyway, our new server's still being built by LiquidWeb, and we don't know when exactly it'll be ready for us to start moving things over. It's quite the powerhouse, though: two of Intel's Clovertown processors (which are quad-core, with each core being 1800 MHz), with up to 12GB of RAM. We're only going to have 4GB, though - going to 8GB will cost an extra $100/mo, and going to 12GB would be $200/mo more. If that wasn't enough of a speed bump, we're having them install the php accelerator, and in the coming months, Invision is releasing a new version of the forum that has database improvements, which should also further speed things up.