Snakehead Games is proud to announce that we have succesfully moved Spy Battle to a bigger, faster server. The move was estimated to take 1 hour (where Spy Battle would be down) but was completed in only 1/2 hour. A flurry of sunspot activity (join the game if you don’t know what a sunspot is ) followed.

P.S. DejaVu anyone?

Spy Battle: 2165 will be moving servers on Wednesday, February 25 at 1 pm EST. At that time, Spy Battle: 2165 will go offline and the final data synch will occur.

At approximately 2 pm EST Spy Battle: 2165 should come back online on the new server. If things go perfectly, we will resume operation possibly as early as 1:30 pm EST.

What Will I See: for a few days after the move you will sometimes see the ’spybattle.com’ name be replaced by a number in the URL/address bar of your browser.

Snakehead Games is proud to announce that we have succesfully moved Star Pirates to a bigger, faster server. The move was estimated to take 1 hour (where Star Pirates would be down) but was completed in only 1/2 hour. A flurry of sunspot activity (join the game if you don’t know what a sunspot is ) followed.

Star Pirates will be moving servers on Monday, February 23 at 2 pm EST. At that time, StarPirates will go offline and the final data synch will occur.

At approximately 3 pm EST Star Pirates should come back online on the new server.

What Will I See: for a few days after the move you will sometimes see the ’starpirates.net’ name be replaced by a number in the URL/address bar of your browser.

We have selected Rackspace as our new host company for two of our games – Star Pirates and Spy Battle.  The new (powerful!) server is online and the games are being migrated in the background.  Following this we will be running further validation and verification tests including load simulations.  When this passes, we will be providing updates as to when the ’switchover’ will occur.

We will at the appointed switchover time be taking the games offline, doing the final data synch and bringing up the new servers.  The outage time is expected to be less than one hour in duration.

Our current host provider failed to provide the timeline and quote they promised us today for a parallel server machine setup; on top of this the server faulted – the host provider did nothing – and all of these are absolutely unacceptable.

We are working on the arrangements for a behind-the-scenes preparation / migration to a far more powerful server hosted with a company with an impressive support promise and reputation; we have been in discussions with them and they are preparing options for us to review tomorrow.

The goal is to do this both in as quick a time as possible with as minimal interruption as possible – to that end we are employing their services with the migration assistance. Details and timeline are being firmed up tomorrow.

Star Pirates and Spy Battle server went down at approximately 19:00 EST today. The server has been re-booted and is back on line. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The move to the new server has been successful. We were able to move Star Pirates to the new server and bring it up a bit faster than anticipated. Some lag may be experienced as we work on configuring the new server and game code to play nice together. Thanks to our dedicated players for their patience during this stressful (for us) time. We will continue to work on optimizing the performance so that you can continue with your regular ‘fast and furious’ play.

Due to some issues with the new server set-up, we were forced to revert back to the old server for Star Pirates. Starting today at 10:30, we will try the move again. Once the server is back up, a limited number of logins will be allowed. This will gradually be increased as we are assured that the new server configuration can handle it. We appreciate your patience during this move.

Here’s the details:
When: Wednesday, Feb 4 @ 10:30 AM EST (server time)

What Will Happen: the game will go offline. The goal is to have the game migrated, tested and up and running again on the new server within 2-3 hours. At that time, we intend to turn the game back ‘on’ and players can resume playing.

What Will I See: for a few days after the move you will sometimes see the ’starpirates.net’ name be replaced by a number in the URL/address bar of your browser.

Why the move? We’ve used a dedicated server 7/24 for a year. We had a backup waiting but they both age. That puts us at risk of a potential hardware fault and the specs on the server are showing its age. While it still runs quickly, hardware has improved and we’re taking advantage of that to run faster which lets us have more options to add game play features without lag. Our new host manages the hardware and has more inbound network connections also which should help avoid the annoying periodic lags from network provider faults we saw a few times last year, including yesterday.

Why the number instead of the name? It takes some time for the server’s location to become known across the internet – the number is a trick we can use to ensure you can reach the game before the rest of the Internet has figured it out. We also have to force the old host and new host (and the domain holder) to pick up the changes – they can lag on the updates.

Summary: Star Pirates will be off-line for several hours starting at 10:30 AM EST Wednesday February 4, 2009