We are excited to announce that we have now moved TeamworkPM to the Amazon EC2 cloud!
Why did we make the move?
Business has been going great here at TeamworkPM; we now have more users than ever before. However, the increased demand has put a strain on old hardware which led to the occasional hiccup. This was unacceptable to us.
We love our customers and want to provide the best possible experience. After a lot of research, we made a big decision and then spent the last 3 weeks moving the entire TeamworkPM infrastructure to Amazon EC2.
TeamworkPM is more robust
With the move to Amazon EC2, we have now introduced better load balancing and automatic failover. If something causes a server to fail, other servers will take over automatically; allowing us to investigate the source of the problem without getting in your way.
TeamworkPM is Faster!
With this upgrade to Amazon EC2 Cloud hosting, we have increased the number of servers hosting TeamworkPM and added in a new memcached caching layer – the result is a faster experience for everyone.
TeamworkPM is more scalable
Amazon gives us far more control over the hardware in use. This means that the scaling issues we were facing last month are no longer an issue. Amazons platform gives us the advantage of being able to quickly increase the RAM and processing power of servers at the touch of a button. Most importantly it allows us to be quickly bring new servers online to cope with demand.
The other massive advantage is far more reliability when it comes to protecting your data. Hardware failures are a lot less in EC2 but if they do occur everything is well backed up and recovery is a lot easier and faster.
DNS and change-over pains
The move across took place last weekend during a pretty tiring all night job for the team. We are really pleased with the transition, everything ran smoothly and the months of planning thankfully paid off. The only thing we have been disappointed with is the Internet providers around the world not following the correct procedure for DNS rules. Switching to Amazon meant that we had to change the DNS records for all TeamworkPM domains. To reduce the change over time we set each domain's TTL (Time to live) to be valid for only 5 minutes. This enabled the transition to happen seamlessly for most users.
However about 2% of our users were left seeing the old servers long after the update. Strictly speaking this shouldn't have happened but some ISP's don't play by the rules or respect the TTL for DNS refreshing. For those who were affected, we detected this and automatically moved any affected accounts temporarily to a teamworkhq.com address. If your site address is teamworkhq.com now, we will switch you back to your old teamworkpm.net address this weekend.
If you are having any issues you can always contact support@teamworkpm.net
Custom Domains change-over to CNames
If your account is running on a custom domain you must convert your DNS A record to a CName record. We apologise for any inconvenience caused during this changeover – it was a once-off and it's going to be worth it.
A big thank you!
It’s been a tough few months for us here at TeamworkPM HQ but we would like to thank you for your support during the move. We have received really nice emails and messages during this time wishing us good luck and they are much appreciated.
We would also like to say thank you for your business. We have some great updates planned for the coming months and our new infrastructure facilitates more new and exciting possibilities.