*sigh* Apparently there are enough Nervous Nellies at Draknet that Jen's decided to put off the upgrade for "a month or two" while everyone double-checks their sites on a test server.

I think it's cool they're so responsive to their customers, so I'm not gonna complain. I'll just re-date this announcement when it's for real, next time.

Sorry for any hub-bub it caused.

Our most excellent webhost Drak.net will be starting a major MySql upgrade on all their servers next Monday, March 31st.

Due to popular demand, we will begin upgrades on MySQL 4.1 to bring it to version 5 starting the week of Monday, March 31st, 2008 and continuing throughout the week until all shared and fully managed dedicated servers are completed.

What it means to you is... that when they get to our server sometime that week there will be some site downtime -- unavoidable, and if their history is any indication, Jen and her burly geeks will have us all back up and running quickly so I'm not overly concerned.

I've double-checked with Drupal and they say our version (5.7) is compatible with the new MySql database software, so again, no major worries. BUT:

I officially encourage all GMs to grab the latest copies of their games and campaign material BEFORE March 31st. Just to be safe.

This goes for other gamers here too, if you've got stuff in the Notepad or in PMs over on the forum that you don't want to lose -- get back up copies of it. Again, just a bit of CYA in case something catastrophic happens.

I'll be doing a full back up of our MySql database -- again, suspenders and belt -- but that doesn't guarantee we'll be able to extract anything from it after the upgrades are done.

We'll be celebrating our first year in existence in June without any major bobbles from the site's "back end" (that's the stuff the rest of you never have to deal with). Given some of the horror stories I've heard from others who've attempted to do this on other webhosts, I count my lucky stars that I found Draknet and stuck with them when it came time to put LostCoastGaming.com up as a community gaming site. :)