You didn't just delay it again. Did you? [22nd September 2003]
We've been working very hard. The system is working pretty well already. We are still tying up those annoying loose ends. The major focus change of the new system is the fact that you will be able to manage multiple tracking projects and users from a single account. We've also invested in a major hardware upgrade. We now have 3 dedicated servers up and running and we should be able to add more to scale the system indefinitely.
We are launching with very similar stats to the current system, as we'd like to test some of the pay stats a little bit more before unleashing them into the wild. The new system cleverly allows this level of flexibility. We'd like to take baby steps and see how you respond to the new system first. You may hate it!
The main reason for the delay was the one final decision we made last week.
We decided we are going to attempt to implement a real-time backup system for your information and stats. At the moment we are backing up your stats to a local and remote location every 24 hours. This is a great safety net, as we know we will never lose more than 24 hours of data.
We've been very lucky with RackShack, as the server has never crashed. But I dread the day, that the hard disk crashes, and I have to wait for the database server to be fixed as I revert to potentially 24 hour old stats before I can begin recording your stats again. I've had many a sleepless night thinking about this. So with the new system, the only way to lose any recorded data will be if 2 database servers crash around the same time. This is very unlikely, but if it does happen then I can honestly say that there was nothing else I could have done to save your data, and we'll revert to the daily back up.
We'll be in touch with our beta testers shortly. We've gotten the 10 we asked for, and I thank you for your generous support. We don't need any more offers.