Conductor has successfully moved to its new servers!
On July 2, the migration went as smoothly as we could have asked for, completing ahead of schedule. After several weeks of testing and preparation, we are pleased to say that Conductor is serving pages in half the time it was before.
This is a major upgrade for Conductor, and we're excited about what it means.
Performance
Speed is an important factor in visitor satisfaction, so much so that Google is now penalizing slow sites in the search rankings. As I mentioned, Conductor is much faster than it was before. Our old servers averages 298ms/request. While this wasn't slow, we wanted to improve it. The new servers are averaging 135ms/request!
Scalability
As we add more sites (we're up to 180+ now, with new ones each week) the servers will have more to process. This is a simple fact of web applications, but fortunately there's a pretty easy solution - throw resources at it. More memory, more storage, more processing power are all available in an easy plug-and-play architecture.
Security
Finally, we've been talking about an upcoming feature for some time that will allow site managers to lock down pages or entire sites. The password protection feature is our next major development milestone and moving servers is a key part of that. The new provider satisfies the University's increasingly strict security standards and our Conductor team, OIT, and the new provider are working closely together to ensure that our information is safe. Keep an eye on the Conductor news feed for updates on this feature.
The Ideal Move
In the end, the migration took about 2 hours (including testing) and the administration side of Conductor was down for about 90 minutes. Website visitors never noticed a thing, as there was no downtime during the move. This is due to the extensive planning and execution by a great team. Nearly three weeks later, we're still running strong.