With a stable version of Community Server finally out in the form of 2.0, John and I are investigating the transition. We have a few things to look at and we as a community need to realize that this site is more than a personal site. It is a real production system. Just like the ones you and I go to work with and maintain everyday. Have you ever heard you company say, lets upgrade to this new out-of-the-box system without any worries of how it will effect your company? I think not.
Here are the things we have to consider in this upgrade:
- Link Strength - Making sure all links remain valid, we have a lot of search engine traffic!
- Bandwidth - We already push 300GB/mn on this site and the additional features will only add more
- Servers - Our dedicated machine will need an update and we will need another server for the data storage
- Licenses - Community Server is $900, SQL Server is $5000, Windows Server is $1000+
- Time - Now that John and I are our own consulting firm, we have to budget time for this project
- Features - GWB has major feature enhancements to .Text, those will need to be ported to CS
These are just a few of the concerns we have since we are a 900+ member site with tons of data. Bringing down the server for just a day will cause the bots to go crazy. Google comes by scraping 200,000 times a month so we have to make sure we have a Plan A, B, C ... X for this migration.
So again, please bear with us during this time and report any current issues you are having to this contact form and we will try to solve you problem in the current system ASAP.