What we’ve been doing

Many of you are aware that we run a sister website to FineArtViews called FineArtStudioOnline. Well, FineArtStudioOnline is actually how we make our living. That’s one reason we’ve been able to offer FineArtViews for free, because our income comes from other places. 

Since we always want to provide artists with the best products and services possible, earlier this year we decided that we wanted to dramatically improve the way FineArtStudioOnline works from a technical standpoint. We started this project in January and originally intended to spread it out slowly over the entire year. However, in late-June some scheduling issues arose that made it clear to us that we needed to dig in and finish the project by September 1^st.   So we started working, and, as the programming has taken every waking hour of our time since the end of June, some things had to slide temporarily….including writing for FineArtViews.

The good news is that we’re essentially finished and simply have a bit of final testing left in the process.

So what, exactly have we changed? And Why?

So our most of our changes had one overriding idea in mind:

So, the short version of our goals were simple:   Speed and Redundancy for our systems.

Unfortunately for us, developing programs to be redundant (distributed if you want to know the fancy geek word for it) is a great idea, but fairly complicated. Fortunately for our customers, we’ve figured it all out and are now essentially finished with the re-programming of our systems.

We have made FASO sites much faster and, for redundancy, we have redesigned our entire system so that our software has at least two (and in many cases three) ways to accomplish each task. We don’t ever want a failure in a system to take down any of our clients’ websites. 

A few of the things we’ve improved are:

- a huge, across the board speedup of all pages

- moved all websites to a "cluster" of servers that will keep all sites operating even in the event of an entire server failure (this also helps with speed since multiple servers are responding to web page requests)

- moved all data to a "cluster" of databases that will keep operating in the event of a database failure

- installed multiple mail server options to keep email flowing in the event of a mail server failure.

- installed triple-redundancy on image storage, so that our artists’ images are safely stored in three places (those storage areas are separated geographically too - to keep images available in the event of some kind of disaster at a physical data center location).

- created the ability to take individual servers offline for maintenance without affecting any client sites or access to sites.

- set up a secondary web server configuration at another geographically separated data center so that we can recover artist websites in the event of a natural disaster at our primary data center.

- Created all the same redundancy options for our support team portal so that they are always available to answer artist questions.

- Improved our monitoring systems so that we are alerted even faster if any problems are brewing.

When we’ll be back

As we mentioned earlier we want to do a couple weeks more monitoring and testing before we announce the project “completed.” Also, there are some upcoming scheduling issues with our team that will make it difficult to return to writing FineArtViews before Semptember.

So here’s our plan:

We’ll restart our daily FineArtViews newsletter on September 2^nd.

We’ve missed our daily art conversations with you and are really looking forward to getting things restarted. Thank you for your patience with us while we’ve made these needed improvements to our services.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic