We recently decided to upgrade to a new hosting server (available to our X-Cart clients) as the old one was getting a little slow and there wasn't much we could do to upgrade it. So, after weighing the options, we decided to go with a brand new, top of the line server at Rackspace. They have been nothing short of phenomenal as a server management company for the past 3 years, so there was no doubt we would be going with them for the new server. In addition, having the server on the same network made the migration much easier.

For those of you who are technically inclined, here are the specs:

- Dual Core AMD Opteron 1212
- 4GB DDR2 RAM
- 3x146 SCSI Drives in a RAID 5 array
- Cisco PIX 501-50 Firewall
- Daily incremental backup to offline backup server

This setup allows us to run the databases off from one drive, and the RAID array with SCSI drives makes things run twice as fast. The improvement from our old single drive ATA server is stunning, and the newest version of Plesk comes with much improved e-mail filtering options.

I would like to personally thank Matt Service from Service Internet Solutions who did the migration for us. The service was fantastic, he completed it in the early morning hours of a Sunday, and there were NO issues. This is why you should pay a professional for these types of things, the headaches we could have encountered....well...let's not go there :)

In any event, our X-Cart clients' sites are now loading almost instantly, even the ones with heavy traffic and thousands of products. We now have some more slots available on the server, and will be offering them along with our design packages. Contact us for more information.

Have a great July!