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Hello, I'm cross posting this on both TJA and PAL.
When we took over WWOEC and Re-established the Pal comix forum, along with updating the TJA forum from it's ancient version of VBulletin I honestly didn't expect the RAPID expansion of activity on the sites. I know a lot of you want to post a lot more artwork and we'd be exceptionally cool with that, If I didn't build the two servers we run on 4 years ago with the intention of housing Pal, it's content, TJA's site and content, and then some ancillary sites, None of which were growing super fast. In the recent months this has changed. Pal's forum is alive , well, and growing daily, as is TJA's. TJA Went from 3 or 4 active artists to housing over 40 with more being added as I can, or as I'm being asked. Truth is the machines are stressed pretty heavy in the prime time hours as I'm sure you've noticed. I had put up a donation drive on TJA and it was in the realm of over $5000 to pick up a pair of new servers to run on. (We run double redundant so you don't lose us for maintenance or upgrades) It was and is a lot of money. We've made it up to about $140 since I put it up, and at that pace we'd likely have never gotten the money set aside to build the new machines.
WELL... Now we don't have to! Thanks to a nearly life long friend of mine we have a new paid of Dell's sitting down in Fort Lauderdale for me to go pick up, they're about 20x faster than our current machines. Catch is we don't get any Hard Drives. SO This is where you guys come in. We need to raise enough money to buy 8 Western Digital 1 or 2 TB RE4 Drives.. We run on 8 500GB RE4's now and they've been rock solid reliable for the last 4 years , WD has a great warranty , I've replaced 2 in that time.. FOR FREE sans shipping. NOW if we want to raise more we can move to 10k or 15k drives.. but yeah.. EXPONENTIAL price increase , and then of course there are the Enterprise SSD's. But honestly that's SOOO overkill.. 8 Western Digital RE4's with a 5 year warranty will run $1200 ($150 apiece). And like about $100 to cover gas and what not to head down to Lauderdale pick them up, stop in Orlando to have our Server tech make sure all is copasetic, and that all will go well when we transition to them then head back up here to Jax and install them into the Racks.
Let's call it $1400 total to be safe.
Even while all of this is going on I expect zero down time. The way we're set up each server can handle the entire load of the sites, we just have one machine take up all the slack, replace the 2nd machine, let it resync with the array, then do the same thing to the first server.. It'll all be very transparent. It will also make a HUGE difference in site speed and out capacity to allow more art to be posted.. If you're willing and able you guys n gals can send what you can afford to the tja server fund paypal account by sending it to printing@catsncameras.com with some note that it's for the server upgrades. I promise it will be worth your efforts! If you have any questions , feel free to ask below and I'll do my best to answer them.
~Cheetah
When we took over WWOEC and Re-established the Pal comix forum, along with updating the TJA forum from it's ancient version of VBulletin I honestly didn't expect the RAPID expansion of activity on the sites. I know a lot of you want to post a lot more artwork and we'd be exceptionally cool with that, If I didn't build the two servers we run on 4 years ago with the intention of housing Pal, it's content, TJA's site and content, and then some ancillary sites, None of which were growing super fast. In the recent months this has changed. Pal's forum is alive , well, and growing daily, as is TJA's. TJA Went from 3 or 4 active artists to housing over 40 with more being added as I can, or as I'm being asked. Truth is the machines are stressed pretty heavy in the prime time hours as I'm sure you've noticed. I had put up a donation drive on TJA and it was in the realm of over $5000 to pick up a pair of new servers to run on. (We run double redundant so you don't lose us for maintenance or upgrades) It was and is a lot of money. We've made it up to about $140 since I put it up, and at that pace we'd likely have never gotten the money set aside to build the new machines.
WELL... Now we don't have to! Thanks to a nearly life long friend of mine we have a new paid of Dell's sitting down in Fort Lauderdale for me to go pick up, they're about 20x faster than our current machines. Catch is we don't get any Hard Drives. SO This is where you guys come in. We need to raise enough money to buy 8 Western Digital 1 or 2 TB RE4 Drives.. We run on 8 500GB RE4's now and they've been rock solid reliable for the last 4 years , WD has a great warranty , I've replaced 2 in that time.. FOR FREE sans shipping. NOW if we want to raise more we can move to 10k or 15k drives.. but yeah.. EXPONENTIAL price increase , and then of course there are the Enterprise SSD's. But honestly that's SOOO overkill.. 8 Western Digital RE4's with a 5 year warranty will run $1200 ($150 apiece). And like about $100 to cover gas and what not to head down to Lauderdale pick them up, stop in Orlando to have our Server tech make sure all is copasetic, and that all will go well when we transition to them then head back up here to Jax and install them into the Racks.
Let's call it $1400 total to be safe.
Even while all of this is going on I expect zero down time. The way we're set up each server can handle the entire load of the sites, we just have one machine take up all the slack, replace the 2nd machine, let it resync with the array, then do the same thing to the first server.. It'll all be very transparent. It will also make a HUGE difference in site speed and out capacity to allow more art to be posted.. If you're willing and able you guys n gals can send what you can afford to the tja server fund paypal account by sending it to printing@catsncameras.com with some note that it's for the server upgrades. I promise it will be worth your efforts! If you have any questions , feel free to ask below and I'll do my best to answer them.
~Cheetah