As you've most likely noticed lately, we've had occasional periods of downtime, and a full day of downtime a few days ago. The full-day downtime was due to hardware problems, which have been fixed and nothing was lost. I apologize for not keeping closer contact with our hosted sites, as it's something you should expect from any host.

Right now we are still running into occasional problems with our mySQL server 'freezing', it is not hardware-based nor is it the server overloading. I hate to admit it, but we have no idea what is causing this problem yet. As of today we have implemented a few solutions to stop downtime, by setting up scripts to automate restarting mySQL - which at least solves that part of the problem. Considering we've been at this for 3 1/2 years I'm certain we'll fix it shortly, but I felt with the lack of communication from edgenetwork staff lately that you all deserved an honest update.

In other news, to recap the past few months, we now operate primarily on a Dual Xeon 2.0ghz (with Hyper-Threading too, naturally), with 2GB Ram, and SCSI drives. The move took place in May, not too long after my last global email informing you we would be moving. We performed the move so quickly it almost seemed like a small outage, completed in just under 2 hours. Our traffic has continued to grow ever since, not only that, we've managed to be on the receiving end of better deals and as a result we're planning to expand in any way we can. Including but not limited to, a paid-for web hosting option not restricted to gaming at all. We'll have more news on that later.

I have to say, I'm not sure what I pictured edgenetwork to become when I was 'playing around' with the idea back in early 2000, then with how badly the advertising industry was in 2001 (the 'great depression' for the gaming community), I never thought we'd still be around for 2003, let alone heading into 2004. Some of you have been hosted by us for years, but to all of you I thank for you bearing with us whenever we've had a slight problem or setback, instead of 'jumping ship' at the first sign of trouble. We have a long list of changes/plans we intend to make over the coming months, including an overhaul to our edgewebmaster system, hopefully bringing it up to par with today's standards (such as CPanel), and then beating them :) Including a change to edgefiles, to make it.. better :P Such as mirrors dedicated just to hosted sites, so our mirroring popular files doesn't interfere in what is a requirement to you hosted sites. I hope you all do understand, the requirement for edgefiles is to spread bandwidth usage to save costs, not something we're doing just to be nasty. If anyone would like to suggest something we can do, feel free to let me know.

Thanks for your patience in reading through these ramblings ;)


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Shawn Harkin
www.edgenetwork.org