Ministry Centered Technologies

Before I say anything else, I’ve got good news. Planning Center is back online! Not only that, we are giving everyone 4 days free for the trouble it has caused and just to say thank you for being so patient with us. Your next credit card charge will be postponed 4 days.

In case you had not noticed, Planning Center has had some network problems over the last couple of days. First it was because the server got overloaded when everyone returned from their vacations at the same time. Then after that was fixed, AT&T went down in Palm Springs and is actually still down while I write this.

We were already in the process of upgrading our servers, but once we realized AT&T couldn’t tell us when they would be back up, we drove to our server facility, physically retrieved the servers, brought them back, and began the process of transferring the database and application to our new servers. If you want the full details of all that happened, there are a couple of posts on our blog here: http://blog.ministrycentered.com/

At around 11PM Pacific Time, the process was completed and Planning Center is back. The good news is that we have moved to some seriously upgraded servers so that this won’t happen again. Our new servers are with rackspace.com. First of all, they guarantee 100% uptime, which means this won’t happen again! For more detailed information on why they are so good, check out this page: http://www.rackspace.com/whyrackspace/network/

In addition, Planning Center should be quite a bit faster due to faster hardware in our servers. We were at a 2MB connection and our new servers have a 100MB connection. We are committed to making Planning Center as fast as possible so that you don’t have to think about it.

After we make sure the transition to the new servers is smooth and complete, we will finish up work on our next update. We’ve got some exciting new features that we are hoping to release soon.

Thank you once again for using Planning Center. We wish you many blessings in 2008.

The Planning Center Team (Jeff, Aaron & Jeff)

Wooohooo!!! We are back up…I have just switched over the DNS entries for our site to www.planningcenteronline.com to the new servers, it should only take an hour or two to propigate. If it is not working for you try staging.planningcenteronline.com.

Please e-mail us at support@ministrycentered.com for any issues that might have popped up.

Thank you so much for your prayers & support.

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

We have restored the database to our new server. We are now working on getting the app fully functional. Anyone know how to get rmagick running on Red Hat Enterprise Edition?

Jeff

Hello,

We are back at our office and we are hooking up the database server and uploading the database right now.

Jeff

Hello Everyone,

In case you don’t know what’s going on, let me tell you.

Yesterday (Jan 2), we had an overwhelming amount of traffic since almost all of you resumed work after the holidays at the same time. This caused major strain on the servers which caused them to be either very slow or non-responsive. We had anticipated this and had already ordered new upgraded servers at another server facility, but we were dependent on that facility to give us the proper information to start using their servers. Unfortunately, we did not get the information in time and subsequently weren’t able to make the transition before you all came back for the new year. This caused the problems yesterday, but by the end of the day, everything seemed to be working smoothly again.

Then at 7:00am Pacific Time this morning, the ISP (internet service provider) that our current server facility uses went down. Their ISP is AT&T and as a result, every other server in our area (almost all of them in Palm Springs) is also down. Our server facility (DISC) is working frantically with AT&T to get this fixed and this morning told us it would be resolved in an hour. This has obviously not been the case as it is still not fixed, and they are unable to give us an estimate.

So unfortunately for us, these 2 unrelated incidents happened 2 days in a row when almost all of you are dependent on our site. I can’t tell you how sorry we are about this. I personally use the site at my church as well, and I know how dependent we are on Planning Center, so I know what many of you are going through. Please know we are doing EVERYTHING in our power to resolve this as quickly as possible.

So here is the current status. We finally received the information to switch over to the new servers this morning. Jeff has been frantically working all day getting the application installed and setup. Our problem is that the database is stored on the servers at our old server facility which is the one that is down. So instead of waiting an undefined amount of time, Jeff is driving to the facility at this very moment to physically retrieve the servers so that he can bring them back and immediately transfer the database to our new servers. The facility is an hour away, which unfortunately means that you won’t be able to get to your information for at LEAST another 2 hours, but in all likelihood, it will take quite a bit longer to transfer all the information over.

We are committed to finishing this as soon as possible, but can not give an accurate estimate on when you will regain access to the site other than tomorrow morning. In addition, since we are being forced to rush the server transfer process, there will probably be slight issues during the day tomorrow as well until we are able to fully test it.

We want to thank you for your continued patience and for helping make Planning Center what it is today. We appreciate you and are so blessed to be able to help you organize and facilitate your ministry.

Aaron Stewart
Product Manager
Planning Center Online

UPDATE (1:45pm PST): We have gotten our new servers pretty much up and running and we are going to our current datacenter to remove our servers and bring them back to the office so that we can upload the database to our new server farm.

Hello Everyone,

I am sorry to report that Planning Center Online is down right now. At around 7:00am (PST) this morning I received a text message letting me know our site was down. I immediately checked and saw that the issue was with our internet host DISC (who provides internet to practically every business where we live), who I called. When I called them they let me know that this was affecting all of their customers and they were working on it. Around 10:00 I called again and they let me know that the issue is with AT&T and that they are working together to solve this issue. I will update this blog as I get more information.

The funny thing about this is that we just got access to our new servers at RackSpace. RackSpace guarantees 100% up time and we are excited to see the performance increase that we will get from their superior network. I am working on installing PCO on those servers and I hope to transfer over ASAP.

Again we are sorry about this and if you have any questions or comments please call us at (88 777-2821 or e-mail us at support@ministrycentered.com.

Thanks!
 
Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies