IMPORTANT: Extended Maintenance Period
This is an important announcement for all members and visitors of Lottery Post and USA Mega regarding Web site availability on Monday, September 29, 2008.
Starting Monday morning at 7:00 AM Eastern Time, there will be an extended service outage, lasting until approximately 7:30 PM Eastern Time Monday evening.
The following services will be affected:
It is possible that the above mentioned services will continue to be available after 7:00 AM, but I am currently advising that all Web site visitors anticipate 7:00 AM as the service down-time, as a conservative estimate.
If I am able to provide a more accurate time, I will post the updated information here.
Once the Web sites and other services go offline, they will remain offline until approximately 7:30 PM Eastern Time Monday evening.
Any e-mails sent to Lottery Post or USA Mega during the service outage will be held in an undeliverable state by your e-mail server, and they will be automatically delivered once the e-mail servers come back online. That will happen automatically, with no action required on your part.
In preparation for the service outage, at approximately 6:15 AM Eastern Time Monday morning, I will be removing the ability to:
- Post messages to the Lottery Post forums,
- Post predictions to the Lottery Post Predictions board,
- Post blog entries at Lottery Post, and,
- Send private messages to other Lottery Post members.
This will be done to ensure that none of the important content information stored in our databases around the time of the service outage is lost.
Most other features at Lottery Post (and USA Mega) will continue operating normally, until the Web sites go offline at 7:00 AM (or sometime after that).
I have included a summary of the Monday timeline below, as a quick reference.
This maintenance is unavoidable, and is part of a large data center reorganization involving several hundred companies.
I have worked very hard to ensure that the sites and services will experience as small of a downtime window as possible. My goal is to work to keep the total downtime to less than 12 hours.
For comparison, most other companies involved in this data center maintenance are experiencing downtimes of between 40 and 48 hours.
I greatly appreciate your patience and understanding while we are all going through this challenging maintenance period Monday.
If service is not restored by 7:30 PM Monday evening, please know that I am hard at work to restore it, and it will be completed as early as I possibly can.
I have provided as much detail about the nature of the maintenance as I'd like to post here on the forums, but if you have any questions regarding the timeline or how the Web sites or other services will function, please feel free to post your questions here, and I will do my best to answer them.
Monday, September 29, 2008 Service Outage Timeline
- 6:15 AM — Ability to post to the forums, blogs, predictions board, and private messages will be removed
- 7:00 AM — Earliest time that service may become disrupted (will update if a concrete time is determined)
- 7:30 PM — Target time to resume service of Web sites, e-mail, and other services