I tell ya, I really wish I could go back exactly 2 weeks.

Here's what I would do:

a) Get all the WinCustomize.com skin libraries backed up.
Get redundancy going on the sites
c) Get THREE brand new machines to the server site.

Right now, JoeUser.com, WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, and all our other sites are running on TWO machines. Two PCs. It's ridiculous. But we've had two machines die in the past month. Not a shining time for Dell (nor their fault).

One failed machine has a motherborad problem which causes it to constantly reboot. The other had a hard drive crash.

And so we've had to consolidate everything to 2 machiens while we rush to ship new machines there while we work out the warranty procedures on what's broken. But that is the #1 reason why things are a little sluggish. We're sending out one tomorrow and hopefully it'll be taking part of the load off next week.

It's really frustrating because the sites, particularly WinCustomize.com, had been builting to incredible levels of traffic. WinCustomize was getting up to 80,000 unique visitors per day. Since the crash, it hasn't gotten back to 70,000 per day yet. That's at 15% decrease in users. JoeUser hasn't been quite as heavily hit because it's much newer. But I can feel things just being slower and there's just nothing that can be done before hardware gets there. The database server is now on a machine that was designed to be a file server. It's a hard thing to go from being on a dual 3Ghz Xeon setup with SCSI to some 1.2 Ghz machine with a few IDE drives on it.