Site News & Announcements

[NOTICE] Important Server Hardware Upgrade Pre-nouncement

Greetings and Happy Holidays Members!

(This is a little long, but please take a moment to read it all the way through... )


It is time to upgrade our email server's old hardware to new. Our last email server upgrade was a little over two years ago. The processors in our new server are approximately 4 times faster than in this current one! As our active member base continues to grow steadily, keeping up to date with our resources is extremely important.

We expect no loss of email, new or old, while making this upgrade. After the change, you will not experience any changes to the interface or the email system including folders and address books.

Tenative Schedule: Wednesday = December 17th, 2003 @ noon
Tenatively, I am scheduling the upgrade for Wednesday December 17th. Complete moving of the email server and its 90+ Gigs of email data will take between 12 and 24 hours to complete fully. That will mean some downtime for email service on Writing.Com. The amount of time each account will be offline for email service will vary from one member's account to another, (more on "how it will vary" below).

I am not sure of the exact times, but we won't try to do this under cover of darkness (ie; night time). This is because if we have troubles with the move, we'll want our web hosting company's superb support team to be available to us. I would expect that we'll start the process around noon; I will provide more exact information a day or two before via email to all members.


The downtime will be limited to a short period for most active members. We will be transferring the contents of all email accounts individually with an automated process. As the mail for each account is transferred, the account holders will be able to access their email.

We will transfer the email of the most recently active accounts first. This will mean very little downtime for the most active members but I can't say for sure how much. It will vary from account to account.


Very Important Information:
Since our email storage space has grown so much so quickly, please note that when we move to the new server, we will begin to pay more strict attention to the amount of email space members are using. Due to technical limitations, we have not been able to automatically enforce the email limits.

With the server upgrade, that problem will be corrected. Please note that this isn't something new. The limits have always been publicly listed and we're now able to acknowledge them. We have kept our pricing for email membership level stable over the past two years; this "bug fix" will enable us to do that for a third year.


The current email limits are:

         Free Members: 4 Megs (4,128 kb) / 250 Messages
         Basic Members: 4 Megs (4,128 kb) / 250 Messages
         Upgraded Members: 16 Megs (16,384 kb) / 2,500 Messages
         Premium Members: 16 Megs (16,384 kb) / 2,500 Messages

Compare Free and Paid Membership Benefits  [E] #688627 Compare different features and benefits of the various membership levels at Writing.Com. by Writing.Com Support

** You can view your total email usage by going to your email box and clicking "Folder Summary". Note that for members with larger amounts of mail, this may take a little while to load. The mail system will display your total in "kb".**

If you are over the quota limit for your membership level, please make attempts to clean your email boxes up. This not only relieves strain on our servers, but it frees up our costly redundant hard disk storage space. Once we begin to enforce the email quotas, if you are over the limit you may lose email or may not be able to receive new emails.

Please note: To best support all Writing.Com members, we will be creating the means to provide additional email space for a fee in the future. We do not have an ETA on when that service will be offered, but moving to the new email server is a step in the right direction.


As soon as I am more certain of the exact time, I will send a site wide email'd "ANNOUNCEMENT". That will be approximately two or three days before the actual upgrade.

We greatly appreciate your understanding and patience throughout the upgrade process. Migrating to a new email server is one of the "once-every-couple-of-years" time consuming things that must be done to keep Writing.Com online and stable for us all to use and enjoy.


This upgrade preceeds some very exciting site upgrades planned for the end of this year and the coming new one. I look forward to completing it so that we can move on to the next things on our todo list and get back to creating new options and features to you all, our members!

Thank you for your time and I'm very glad you made it all the way here!!
~~SM (and SMs)

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