Notice of Extended Downtime on 01/07/2015

Beginning at 3AM CT Thursday Morning we will be taking down Roll20 for an estimated seven hours in order to migrate our hosting servers. Our current hosting service has been experiencing stability and security issues recently, and we’ve done our best to work around these problems but it has become increasingly difficult. We began examining a move to Google Cloud Platform hosting several months ago-- in part because of the convenience in relationship to Firebase -- and had not made a final decision until these recent issues with Roll20 downtime and degraded service. We understand this short notice will be an inconvenience to some, but believe it best for the entire site’s population to bring site stability better under our control and hopefully allow us to provide additional speed improvements.

Jake M. said: Other than stability, will these migrations improve performance? Since Riley's pretty busy getting ready for this move, I'm going to answer this to the best of my ability (I got informed enough to be able to help make the decision, but my terminology might not be 100%). There's potential for some improvement merely from lessened communication time between Firebase (our real-time server, owned by Google) and Google Cloud (our soon-to-be database). Additionally, the way Google Cloud does their storage is will allow us to organize in a way that may end up being a little more efficient-- potentially the virtual machines may not have to be as many / won't be shared in the same ways. Again, this is something we were considering before these stability issues arose in hopes of squeezing some more umph out of our capabilities.

Thanks for the feedback John. Glad to hear it! We'll be following up with a full post mortem of our own here in a few days.