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:

• The Lottery Post (www.lotterypost.com) and USA Mega (www.usamega.com) Web sites
• All e-mail to and from Lottery Post and USA Mega
• The Lottery Results Gadget for Windows Vista (www.lotterypost.com/gadget)
• Lottery Post Mobile Edition
• Lottery Post for iPhone/iPod Touch

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

Understandable down time.

Thanks for the heads up...!

ok no problem i copy you

thanks todd

You are the greatest Todd!  Thank you for all you do!  It is hard work and you are dedicated to us.  I appreciate it!  We all do! 

thank u for letting us know in an advance.  I appreciate your hard work. thank u Todd, u r the greatest.

copy 10**4

Thank you for the heads up!

I'm surprised, I always thought Lottery Post would be on it's own dedicated server or you owned its server.   

The web host Lotto-Logix is on blew out one of its servers and they don't work over the weekend.  I haven't seen my site since Thursday.  

BobP



 

Time for my break from numbers research on Monday.

 message received & thanks for all the hard work

Thanks Chief for all you do.
Guess I will have to get some work done while at the office Monday!!!!!

10-4

thanks for letting us know

Withdrawal time.

OH NO what do I DO!!!

Thanks for the heads up.

This will give me time to get ready for Tuesday's class.

Good luck with the updates/mainteinance Todd.

Thanks Todd for all your hard work, I really appreciate this site!!

I'm not sure that you read my note correctly.  LP is on several servers, not just one "dedicated server".

Thank you Todd for the heads up! I had enough time to do my workouts for midday as well as night draw for Monday  on today! Thanks for this wonderful site.

That's definitely the way to go.  I strongly suggest that everyone get their predictions for Monday into the system by tonight.  (Sunday night.)

The prediction winners will be calculated sometime after the system goes back online Monday night.

Todd, thanks for the advanced notification. And like the rest of the LP family, I also appreciate all that you do for us and wanted you to know that it's not taken for granted.  You are an AWESOME team player!

Thanks Todd, hope everything goes well.

Thanks Todd.

This is what threw me . . .

"This maintenance is unavoidable, and is part of a large data center reorganization involving several hundred companies.
*
For comparison, most other companies involved in this data center maintenance are experiencing downtimes of between 40 and 48 hours."

. . . made me think LP was hosted along with hundreds of other sites on whatever equipment was undergoing maintenance.  Seeing my problems reflected in your problems, apparently not the case.  

Sorry about that.  BobP

There are hundreds of companies in any given data center.  A decent data center is huge -- not talking about hobbyists on a $19.95 shared server package!

Thanks for all the well-wishes.  It's going to be a really big deal, and I probably won't sleep for about 48 hours, so they are much-appreciated!

Good Luck Todd. Sounds like a lot of work.  Hope everything goes well.

Thanks Todd for the alert and for all your hard work.   "I'll be up for nearly 48 hours" (paraphrase) .... Ye GADS Todd that is horrific ... hope you'll have a good chunk of time after the fixing is done for a good long rest!

It's nothing a 4-pack of Red Bull and a big sack of peanut M&Ms won't help.

Okie  dokiee and thanks your world

Thanks for the update Mr. Great what would we do without you. I know I would be lost. LotteryPost has given me my life back.

Todd,

Thanks for the Notify.

May The Maintenance Force Be With You.