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No cardboard boxes required though - this is a virtual move.

We're Moving!

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

We're moving! No brown cardboard boxes required though - this is an entirely virtual move.

Some of you may have experienced a go-slow on REALSingapore over the last few weeks, or indeed the occasional complete lack of service to the Network. Frustrating, we know. This is something that we're trying to ensure never happens again.

The problems have largely been caused by a steady, but very substantial increase in crawler traffic to the Real City Network over the last few months. The top search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and many others have been steadily ramping up the number of times they visit us in order to keep their search results up to date. At peak times, as event listings, news and photos poured onto the site, we were being hit by search engines more than 25 times a second. This is fantastic news for us and for our business members as we continue to climb those all important search results, but placed a huge demand on REALSingapore's technical infrastructure.

We have now started the process of moving data across to a brand new, state of the art high speed dedicated server which will give us a huge increase in speed and which offers us guaranteed hardware reliability. We have a team of on-site technicians available to use 24 hours a day, and our data is backed up on a twice daily basis.

Phase one of the move is already complete, with our database now residing on the new server. Phase two will be carried out over the next fortnight as we move the 500,000 photos and the rest of the data. Our goal is, at all times, not to cause unnecessary disruption to the service that we provide.

The move to a much bigger, faster and more reliable server will directly benefit the thousands of daily users that come to the network to be entertained and informed, and will obviously also benefit our many hundreds of business members and Webmaster customers.