I'm going to be doing a server migration over the next few days. The site will be down on and off during this time.
Anything uploaded to the site after this post was made will be lost during the transfer. Content submitted to the site (posts, reviews, user accounts, etc) will not be lost. Just files will be lost during this time (like screenshots).
There are 2 reasons for the migration:
1. The site hasn't been paying for itself in quite a few months. The site fees are $450+ month, the site revenue is less than $100 a month. I'm consolidating all of the servers into a single server, and while that server is still expensive (around $260), it's a lot cheaper than the $450. The current servers include the site sever, netplay server, minecraft server, and file server.
Unfortunately, new server will not be able to contain all of the games from the Retro Game Room, as it's only a 2 TB hard drive. It'll be able to contain all of the music and cartridge based games, but the CD based games will be too large, which means most of those games will be taken down. I'll take the top 10% most popular games from each of the CD systems and those are what I'll keep.
2. The current server software is very outdated and can't be updated. Having better hardware/software will allow me to do things with the server that I've never been able to do. It also gives me the power to improve the site performance by utilizing features that prevent bot abuse.
I should also point out that the new server is 2x more powerful than the current main server, which is crazy because they're about the same price.
With all of that said, the site will perform a lot better after the migrations. I've already purchased and setup the new server, all of the files have already been migrated. The things I have left to do include:
1. Configuring the new server to match the configuration of the current
2. Figuring out what things I need to install on the new server so that nothing stops working
3. Transferring the database
4. Pointing the domain name to the new server
If you have any questions or feedback, go here:
https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=105556