The new AboveTopSecret.com server cluster is up and running! To keep pace with the demand of our members and the visitors that read their posts, AboveTopSecret.com has upgraded to a new server cluster that distributes web application services and database duties between two new high performance servers. This means a significant new boost in overall site performance as well as a stable platform for future growth.

Since first moving ATS from a web-space hosting provider to a dedicated server in April of 2003, our growth has been nothing less than astounding. In order to keep pace with traffic, we've needed to upgrade our hardware almost every eight months. This latest upgrade represents our fourth investment in improved server architecture. The path has been:

• ATS:1 Dedicated Pentium IV server, 1 gigabyte of RAM
• Add ATS:2, a Dedicated dual 2.4 GHz Xeon server with 2 gigabytes of RAM
  (ATS:1 continues with minor support services)
• Add ATS:3, a Dedicated dual 2.8 GHz Xeon server with 4 gigabytes of RAM assigned to host the boards
  (ATS:2 becomes retains hosting of the blogs, webmail, email services, and DNS. ATS:1 is now the chat server, image server, and ad server)
• Add ATS:4 and ATS:5
  ATS:4 is a 2.8 GHz dual-Xeon server with 3 gigabytes of RAM dedicated to hosting only the board database.
  ATS:5 is a 2.8 GHz dual-Xeon server with 2 gigabytes of RAM dedicated to hosting the web application that delivers the boards.
  (ATS:3 will soon be retired, ATS:1 and ATS:2 will continue)

Only a handful of the very largest of discussion board communities require an enterprise-level infrastructure such as this. While our daily post-count and membership numbers don't place us in that category, our daily traffic from visitors plants us firmly and consistently among the top ten most active discussion boards on the Internet (as tracked by Big-Boards.com).

It's rare and highly unlikely for a discussion board community to experience more traffic from guests than members. In my 16 years of involvement with such communities, I've honestly never heard of it happening. At any given moment, the guest-to-member ration on ATS is at least 10:1 and has skyrocketed to over 20:1 during periods of volatile international news. More than anything else, this is a significant testament to the value of the content generated by our members and order managed by our moderation staff. Content websites with poor material simply don't grow. And only content sites with exceptional material grow at the pace we're experiencing.

So stop reading this boring bit of drivel from the front office and get back to the boards and enjoy your newfound speed and performance... you deserve it.

Oh... and thanks for making my duties as manager of ATS' IT services a living hell!



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