Whenever the forum is down, so is the email. just a minor inconvenience, I'm just more curious than anything. thanks

 

It's possible to have complete redundancy of everything but not in our price range. There are two things I can't replicate cheaply; one is the firewall through which we get our internet connection and the other is our database server. Both of those are six digit problems.

We have an on-line realtime backup of our database which is normally no more than 5 seconds behind and we use that to do searches against because searching doesn't really require immediate updates. Should the database server suffer some horrific disaster and fail I could switch us over to the back in a matter of minutes and we would be back online with all of the data within an hour.

However anything which requires changing data in the database must talk to the master server and that is pretty much everything including email. That is the server which has been giving us problems over the past two weeks. When it crashed it took down everything. The crashing is in the past now as we've installed a less than optimal but stable version of the operating system on it. It has 6GB of RAM we can't use for the time being and will run slower than I'd like because of it but it at least won't crash on us 2 or 3 times a day.