Growing pains

The last month has been a hectic time for the staff at TannerRitchie Publishing, and that's by the standards of a year that has already been our most hectic by far. The swiftly expanding demands on our servers from the complexity and size of Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online (MEMSO) required that we take a long term look ahead at the hardware we were using, and make the necessary investment to ensure we are prepared for the future.

As a result, since our last post in July, we've undergone a complete change in the server hardware that runs our websites and MEMSO. We've also moved the location of the hardware from Vancouver to downtown Toronto. In the process we migrated our increasing complex web application (in fact applications), including databases and hundreds of thousands of files, onto a new architecture without creating too many problems for our users.

By and large we are happy that we managed a reasonably smooth transition. However some users certainly noticed some glitches, and a short period when MEMSO was not accessible via the internet at all. The best laid plans of mice, men and web administrators go oft awry,* and unexpected glitches arose even after extensive testing of the new hardware. For those that have been inconvenienced, we apologize, and hope you appreciate that these growing pains are evidence of TannerRitchie Publishing's commitment to the continuous future development, improvement and growth of MEMSO and our other websites.

We welcome questions about the changes. Please contact us and let us know your thoughts.

*Or, to be more historically accurate, "The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley."