New Web Server Provides Infrastructure for 2007 Web Development Projects

Today I dropped off our new web server at Binary.net; the company that maintains our online infrastructure for us. Our web server is housed in a bank vault behind a 17-ton door. I had the pleasure of touring the vault today to get acquainted with the environment our new server would be occupying.

Since 2005 we have placed exponential increases in bandwidth on our online equipment, and our plans for 2007 demanded a much needed upgrade.

Believe it or not, the engine that was maintaining the Schrock Innovations online technology machine was a simple one. A K6-2 450 processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 30 GB hard drive was more than enough to provide ongoing updates for our Maintenance Checkup Home Edition software, serve all of our clients’ webpages, as well as the Schrock Innovations website as it has grown in national and international popularity.

But we have started setting our internal 2007 goals, and if we are going to meet them we were going to need more online power. A lot more power…

So what might we need the extra power for? Well I can’t be too upfront about that at the moment, but I can say that the new version of our Maintenance Checkup Home Edition (due in February 2007) will make a greater demand on our server, as we are offering free 90-day trial subscriptions so people can try the fully-functional product and see what they think before they buy it.

In addition, we will be adding several high-profile website development projects that should double our server traffic in Q1 of 2007 and take us over 250,000 hosted web pages total. We will be gaining website hosting agreements form major business organizations in Lincoln and Nebraska as a whole, as well as national clients that could bring more than 100,000 unique visitors a day to our server.

The new server is a 64-bit AMD Opteron system with a 250 GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM. We will probably have to upgrade that again late next year to 4 GB of RAM, but for now it should do the trick.

Our web customers and website visitors should only notice that pages from our websites will now load faster and there will be fewer delays during peak traffic times.