SOAR Customers,
As SOAR has grown over the last four years, we have added dedicated servers as needed to handle the large number of customers signing up and to ensure good performance for all customers.
All of our servers are dedicated servers – meaning that SOAR, and only SOAR, has access to the entire server. We are very pleased with our current hosting provider ServerBeach (www.serverbeach.com). They are one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the market and their backbone network provided by their parent company Peer1 (www.peer1.com) is one of the most reliable in the industry.
ServerBeach has provided SOAR with an opportunity to replace all of our existing dedicated servers and to add additional servers for future growth at a very reasonable price. We are jumping on the opportunity to ensure performance for current and future customers.
We apologize for the short notice. We decided that moving to the new servers would be better timed now than waiting until Fall after school starts where there is never a good time for all customers.
A server migration will be occurring between July 27th and 29th which will affect all customers.
- Tuesday July 27th 9AM EST
- All changes to your SOAR website after this point will not be transferred.
- Please hold any changes until after the migration is complete
- A message will be displayed on your SOAR website to those with Add Content/Leader and Administrator permissions to this effect
- The message will let them know not to make any changes
- Thursday July 29th
- We hope to have the migration completed sometime on Wednesday July 28th
- We are planning for an additional day just in case
- As soon as the migration is completed, a message will be displayed on your site to that affect.
- The message will only be shown to those with Add Content/Leader and Administrator permissions
- Once you see the migration complete message, you can start modifying your site again.
Do I need to do anything?
You do not need to do anything. Your site will automatically be migrated to the new servers.
We have a handful of customers that are using SSL for domains they have purchased. We will be contacting them individually with further instructions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Will our unit members notice anything during the migration?
A: Your website will be available to members throughout the migration period.
All content/pages/section of your website will be available for viewing by your members.
The one exception is Event Registration – see below
Q: Will Email Aliases and Email Lists work during the migration?
A: Yes, you can use email during the migration period.
Q: Will event registrations be lost during the migration period?
A: No. We will be modifying the event registration process on the current servers at 9AM EST
Members who click the Register button will receive a message asking them to wait to register until 7/29
This message will disappear once the migration is complete.
Q: What constitutes a “change” that could be lost?
A: Any announcement, event, page, account, custom page, photo album, file, link that is added or updated.
This includes roster, member, PackMaster, and TroopMaster imports
Basically, don’t make ANY changes
Q: How will I know when it is safe to make updates to my website?
A: One of two things will tell you the migration is complete
1. You will receive an email (like this one) declaring the migration is complete
2. You will see a message stating the migration is complete when you login with an account that has Add Content/Leader or Administrator permissions
Q: Do I have to do anything to the domain names I own for the migration?
A: No ! They will automatically follow your SOAR site during the migration.
Q: Why are you doing this in the middle of the National Jamboree?
A: From customer feedback we have found that the worst time to have interruptions in service is the Fall.
Schools start back up in August through early September.
After that is it is recruiting season which is not a great time either.
We can’t wait till the end of the year for this migration, thus the earlier the better.
Half of our customers are Cub Scout Packs that are not attending the Jamboree
Not all Troops have members attending Jamboree
To accommodate for the Jamboree we are starting on the 2nd day so you can make first day updates
We are completing the migration before the middle of the Jamboree
Q: Why can’t you be more specific about when the migration will be complete?
A: A couple of reasons prevent us from providing a specific date/time when the migration will be complete
1. A LOT of data has to be transferred between servers. Depending upon network traffic that time will vary greatly
2. As we bring the new servers up we want to perform a large number of sanity checks before making them live. Should we find issues, we need to take the time to correct them immediately
3. The migration involved changes to Domain Name / IP Address associations which take varying times to reach the individual computers of your members
