As you know, RabbitEars has been hosted by Scott at SatelliteGuys for a number of years now since he had a decent amount of excess capacity after his site last moved servers back in 2011. With various changes to both hosting prices and traffic patterns in the past few years, SatelliteGuys no longer needed the excess capacity that it had, and earlier this month, Scott relocated the site to new hosting elsewhere on leased, rather than owned, hardware.
Unfortunately, with this change, RabbitEars could not come along for the ride. I am extremely grateful to Scott for so generously hosting RabbitEars at no charge for so long, and I certainly understand the desire to reduce costs while simultaneously improving his own site's performance with newer hardware. Scott has been very helpful in helping find RabbitEars a new home, and with his help, someone has offered to take on RabbitEars. I will announce more in the future.
But as currently planned, we're looking at a two-step move process:
First, so that Scott can stop paying for hosting that is now only used for RabbitEars as quickly as possible, the new host is going to set up a temporary server which RabbitEars will move to as soon as is practicable. I am hoping this will not result in any down time, though we will probably disable the Live Bandscan and the Signal Search Map on the old server when we start the move process, meaning some data may be lost or functionality unavailable until the various scanners figure out there's a new server to send to.
Second, I will most likely be building a server to host RabbitEars. The new host has graciously offered to let us host a standard desktop machine rather than a rack-mount, which brings hardware costs out of the stratosphere. I can build new instead of buying used as I had been anticipating, which is great in terms of performance and reliability. But this will necessitate a second move at a later date from the temporary server onto the new one. Hopefully this second move will be less disruptive than I anticipate the first will be given the machines will be in the same building rather than in different states, but it may still cause some disruption.
The specific date is not yet known, and the move will likely come with little warning. I apologize in advance for that.
Please bear with us as RabbitEars makes this move. Your patience is appreciated!
UPDATE 3/1/2021: The move has not yet happened. We had a false start yesterday, but ended up having to delay the move.
