SOAR

SOAR Customers,

We received notice in mid June that our hosting provider Peer1 was closing the data center that our servers are located in at the end of September. We have been working with them to finalize a transition plan for SOAR servers to another data center ever since.

We had hoped to complete the transition in mid August and not go into the Fall time frame when scouting becomes very active again. Unfortunately we could not make that happen. Given all the customers they have to migrate, we did not receive what we felt was a solid confirmed plan to meet those dates.

We have a target transition date of Friday September 6th 5PM ET into the morning of Saturday September 7th. During this time there will be NO access to your SOAR website or email.

Normally we are upgrading to new hardware. We transition each server one at a time to new hardware, leaving the old server in place in read-only mode. Thus your website is still accessible, but you cannot modify it. In some cases, you don't even know its happening because the "cut over" time is so short.

This transition will be different. All of our hardware is up-to-date. Our hosting provider will be cloning our servers from one data center to another. To accomplish that, our servers cannot be online while the cloning in occurring. Why there will be no access to your SOAR websites or email during the transition.

This will be the first time in our 14 year history that we have a planned outage of such duration. While it is not optimal, or at the perfect time, we feel it is the best transition strategy. Our servers will spin up in the new data center and be ready to go immediately. No configuration or migration challenges. Our servers have been in same data center for 14 years as well, something that is a testament to the stability and reliability of our hosting provider.

Do I need to do anything?
- Other than make your members aware of the planned outage, No.

When will the planned outage start?
- 5PM ET on Friday September 6th.

When will the planned outage end?
- We are targeting 6AM ET on Saturday September 7th.
- We hope to be done sooner than that.

Can my members access my Unit website during this time?
- Unfortunately they cannot.
- The servers need to be offline for the cloning process.

Will email work during this time?
- Unfortunately it will not.
- Most email clients will keep trying to send email for 24 hours, so any emails sent during this time will simply be delayed.

I have my EBlast set for Saturday morning, what will happen?
- If the transition goes past the normal EBlast time on Saturday morning, we will manually run it as soon as the new servers are active and verified.

How will I know the transition is complete?
- Your website will be accessible again.
- We will also send an email and post an Alert on your website

Is there any way you can change the date?
- We have looked at all the possibilities.
- We could have done this a little sooner, but we were not confident our hosting provider had all the pieces perfectly in place. We didn't want to risk something going wrong.
- We could have done this later in September. Through the years we've found the later into September you go the more you run into recruiting for Cub Scouts and the first events for Troops.
- So basically the sooner the better.
- At this point, we believe we have picked the dates best for all customers.

SOAR Support