Scheduled maintenance on Monday September 21st

MTGStocks has been running on our own servers since inception over 8 years ago. Since then we have undergone a few migrations and transitions, but all had to do with new versions of the application all running on the same infastructure. The servers we've been running on have occasionally been upgraded to be able to support the growing user base and new features.

Cloud based approaches have been getting more and more popular for good reason. They're more reliable, with better uptime guarantee, and scales more easily with more and more users. Also there is no more need to keep our own infrastructure up-to-date with security patches and hardware upgrades. As some of you may have noticed, we recently had some issues because one of the MTGStocks servers had some hardware failure, resulting in downtime of a few hours and an incident yesterday where users were unable to open card pages.

Tomorrow MTGStocks will migrate from the current infrastructure to a cloud-based architecture. To achieve this we have largely recreated the user facing backend and moved this part to a cloud solution. We have been working on this migration for quite some months, mainly looking for a good moment to actually migrate time-wise and make sure there's sufficient time to keep an eye on how the services are running.

What are we going to do?

Tomorrow on Monday September 21st new prices of cards and interests are retrieved earlier than you are used to. We will close all login and user features around 06:30AM UTC. From there on we will create an extra database backup which will then be used to migrate to our new infrastructure.

Migration is expected to take most of the day. However, since we're moving to a whole new infrastructure, the website will largely keep running. When we're done we will switch over our DNS to the new servers, meaning you will see the migrated website once these are updated for you. This is (usually) largely dependant of your ISP. Except the admin features, the website should remain visible and up and running.

We will leave the old servers running for several weeks after the migration and make sure its pricing data will remain up to date. This means that if really necessary, we can always fall back to the old infrastructure until we are absolutely sure things went properly.

What will change for me?

For now, very little. We tried to make the migration as smooth as possible for the users. Like mentioned earlier you cannot use logged in features for several hours, but once the migration is finished you should be able to use the website as before. But this does set us up properly to do some new awesome things in the future.

We hope that this migration will make MTGStocks more future-proof and enable us to keep serving all of you with new and better features.