Mirror Site(s).

And now my email is toast so I can't communicate with either of them. There must have been a software upgrade or some tweaking done to the server and the mailserver.

I'd email my webhost but ...ya know.

I'll call tomorrow after jury duty.

Pardon my ignorance. This is an area in which I've had no experience, but I've seen it used as a solution to a problem.

There are at least two members (and very valuable ones at that) that seem to be frequently unable to even log in. From appearances, it seems to be a server problem. I've seen similar problems with other sites, and a solution that I've seen offered is volunteers agreeing to offer a mirror site. When one site is difficult, one simply accesses the mirror site. Even though there's a few minutes lag between the contents of the sites they carry identical content.

I don't know the difficulty in such an arrangement, nor if the boss would even consider such an arrangement. Has anyone in our group the expertise to consider the reasonableness of such an arrangement?

Empath,

I think much of the difficulty with mirror sites is the syncing. For where it is used most commonly , FTP, site content is not updated as frequently as a message board. Changes made to the primary site are echoed to their mirrors and automated updates are typically scheduled such that it doesn't occur every minute.

For a highly dynamic message board such as the CPF, syncing may actually increase traffic as each "mirror" tries to update the rest to stay in sync overall. If it doesn't update frequently enough, the mirror servers will drift in sync and have yet more to update each other with eventually.

It's technically not difficult (i'd use rsync for linux) to achieve synchronization, but there are other considerations, like unequal bandwidth supply, security and administration (like keeping the servers updated with the latest software).

IMHO, a distributed server cluster architecture will work better, but that may require a little more co-ordination and cost, bordering on the highly professional.

I may be a little behind in state-of-the-art network synchronization / database replication, but not that far off the truth about mirroring.