From the ARRL website: Logbook of The World (LoTW), ARRL’s online QSO confirmation system, will undergo scheduled maintenance beginning Monday, December 21, at 2300 UTC (6 PM EST) for approximately 6 hours. LoTW will be offline and unavailable while the system’s server is upgraded to new hardware. Thank you for your understanding.
It will run a few months in a different direction until the Geritol team decide that's to much then reverse.
It is due for a new server. Should run much faster after the update. I am a huge fan of LoTW and feel it was a major advance for ham radio. Not to mention a safer alternative in these unusual times.
They need to move it to the cloud where they can scale it up to run heavy weekends and scale it down to be cheap during the slow times ... and never pay for hardware, ups, networking, etc again.
You do know "the Cloud" refers to to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers....right?
While that is "the cloud" in a basic sense, you can run technologies such that you incur no downtime to upgrade, downgrade, or migrate your stack to other systems.
They need to run Vmware on shared storage.....then they could install the hardware and vmotion over to it, live, hot, and on the fly.
Cheaper and easier to go to the cloud for this. This seems like a perfect fit for containers and a PaaS database. With VMware, you still need to maintain the guest OS, patch the hosts, keep VMware tools up to date, and maintain a backup solution.