As you all should know by now The Plasterers Forum is a monster of a site and is the biggest plastering resource to ever exist and it is still growing.
We have been growing and improving since 2006 and with nearly 19,000 members and nearly 400,000 posts and over 20,000 topics there is nothing else out there that comes close to providing news and information to plasterers and interested people to the industry.
Due to the growing size and popularity of The Plasterers Forum we have to have our own individual web servers and over the years the forum has slowed down due to the massive amounts of traffic the site receives.
We have had to do numerous server updates in the past and then when we get to the maximum capabilities of that server we then have to upgrade again.
Well last weekend the forum had a surge of traffic and with an average time spent on the site of over 10 minutes per user this is a huge load on the server and we were receiving errors and crashes.
Ultimately, the traffic managed to crash the server and myself and the server team worked through the night to get the site back up to full speed. We managed to keep the site online but it was very slow but at least it was still there.
So all week we have been looking and researching at what we should do next and what server we should be using for the next upgrade and finally we came to the decision and have gone for a SSD Fire server.
The server move was organised to happen overnight and it was carried out last night at around 04:35 and from what I can see it was a complete success.
We can’t see exactly yet how well this new server is going to cope with the traffic we get at weekends but I am confident that the new Plasterers Forum server will be up to the job and you should now have a fast efficient and reliable experience on The Plasterers Forum.
Thanks again to all the members and sponsors of The Plasterers Forum and Plasterers News as we could not have built this resource without your support.
