So, things didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked. A few things coincided that led to a perfect storm of frustration here on the Sift. Here's the full story.

We were unhappy with our current hosting provider- we have 4 boxes with them that have recently been struggling with load- mostly database issues. The amount of ram in the DB server was half of what we were supposedly paying for – support was sluggish and we were getting pissed. Our good buddies at Neatorama just switched to a new bunch of servers that seemed like a heck of a deal. The move was on.

We needed to time the move to these new, much more powerful servers so that we weren't being double invoiced from two hosting companies. Our monthly server bill is a 4 figure amount that we just can't afford to double-pay.

So we paid for the first month on the new servers and they started building them- they had delays in getting the hardware- which was pushing right up on our invoice date of the 13th for the old servers- they finished building 2 days before the invoice date and Lucky had to pull an all-weekend job to transfer everything over to the new environment.

Still, everything would have been fine if it wasn't for our VideoSift domain hosted with Yahoo Small Business Hosting. When I first registered VideoSift on a lark back in 2006- they were offering $3 domains - and I thought - yes, this is for me. (unemployed at the time) They are a really, really bad service. Their interface appears to date back to the 1990s era web- and is very inflexible. I considered moving the domain onto a more modern registrar- but I was scared to touch it. I had read horror stories of domains being down for weeks on transfers from Yahoo- and had the experience of them just dropping our domain once for 72 hours on a whim. It pretty much works on Yahoo - and I didn't want to touch it.

In hindsight- this was the wrong attitude. The domain name server in the Yahoo control panel had our old server IP addresses in it. We needed to update this to the IP range for our new servers. We figured that this would propagate through in a few hours and people would seamlessly be directed to the new boxes. Unfortunately that was not the case. Yahoo hosting has a TTL "Time to Live" setting on DNS changes of 1 week - and there appears to be no way to modify this value. Even now, 5 days after the move- around 20% of our traffic is being directed to the old server - which has been shut down.

So, there you have it. Amateur hour on the Sift. I've learned my lesson and will move the VideoSift domain to a more reliable host. I'm sorry again for all the disruption. On the bright side- the new servers are great! We have a lot more free memory which we're planning to use to make the site even faster than it already is.