Thanks to everyone who kicked in with last week's bleg. Our new server is on the way from Dell, with a Pentium Core I3 (dual core) processor, a terabyte of storage, and -- most important of all -- 8GB of memory, which is almost three times what we've been tripping along with for the past three years.Paying for the server left two months' worth of hosting in Paypal and another month or so in Amazon, so I'll likely be blegging again in August, barring emergencies like getting sued again. If you feel like throwing even more money my way that'll help put off the fateful day even longer.
I'll probably spend a month or so getting the new server fitted out with Linux -- Ubuntu 10.4 server -- and the databases and servers and such, and then running it (close to) in sync with Helen, our existing server. I'll probably swap them out around the end of June and then we'll have a week or so of bugs to slaughter. I want to keep it running offline for that first month because that's when something usually happens if there's a gross hardware flaw. Once they've been swapped Helen will run here (close to) in sync so that if anything else goes wrong she can go back to work.