We will be migrating the FormSpring site and application to a new hosting platform on Sunday, June 21st from 1:00am – 2:00am Eastern time. During this window we expect less than 5 minutes of actual downtime. With any downtime a maintenance message will be displayed when viewing a form or using the application.

Some Background

We’ve been on our current cluster of servers for a little over a year, but as we’ve continued to grow we see a need to preemptively expand the hosting architecture to accommodate future growth and employ additional high-availability technology.

A few weeks ago we attempted a migration that resulted in unexpected performance issues leading to a two-hour outage, ultimately causing us to revert back to our old servers. We’ve since started fresh with a new data center, new servers, and very different infrastructure.

We feel very confident that this migration will be a success. We’ve assaulted the servers with a battery of new tests to try to pinpoint any potential performance issues and have found the new infrastructure gives us a minimum of 3x more capacity than we have today.

What do I need to do?

In short, nothing. The migration will be very much behind-the-scenes, and you shouldn’t notice anything different in the new environment.

However, there are a couple things you should look out for. These issues are only applicable to a few people so if none of this seems familiar, you can safely ignore this.

  • If you’ve hard-coded FormSpring’s IP addresses in your computer’s hosts file or a router, please remove these entries. It’s important to use our normal DNS servers to obtain IP addresses in real-time.
  • Similarly, if you’ve white-listed FormSpring’s IP addresses in your mail server, please remove these entries and white-list messages coming from any formspring.com server. Messages may come from one of several servers whose IP addresses are subject to change without notice!

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the migration. We will be updating our blog and Twitter stream once the migration is complete or with any additional information.

UPDATE 6/21 1:30am – The maintenance went smoothly and we’re up on the new environment.  If you experience any issues please file a support request.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Maintenance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.