Server Transfer

The new server will be brought online this evening. It is considerably more powerful then the current server and will be a dramatic increase in how much load HL can have at any given point in time.

Unfortunately, although the transfer will only take a few minutes tonight, the DNS Change may cause the site to appear offline to you for several hours once we make the switch. This is something that is out of our control.

The Internet works with a system called DNS (Domain Name Service) which associates names with numbers. In this case the name is www.hogwartslive.com and the number is 64.34.176.216. With a new server comes a new number. While the change of this number in the DNS system will be instantaneous... every ISP (Internet Service Provider) has it's own DNS server, and very commonly these ISP DNS Servers cache the data for several hours. The reason they do this is so that they won't have to look up the ip address for each and every time you click on a link on the site (which on HogwartsLive is a LOT of links) therefore speeding up how long it takes to access a site. Also, your computer will cache this DNS data for a while as well, so that you don't have to ask your ISP's DNS server every page load.

In any case, I'm sorry to be technical but I want to make sure you know WHY the site may appear to be down for a few hours tonight. While the server will be up and ready to accept new connections, your computer and/or your ISP may not notice the change until a few hours after the change has taken place, and therefore the site will appear down for you.

I apologize for any inconvenience, however when the new server is online and running fast, I hope you will all appreciate the improvements.