This past wednesday, all Magnatune services were upgraded to a new server. The were some problems for about 24h (and a 12h outage), but those should now be fixed. There are a few minor things still remaining to be done, which should be completed this weekend, but no more outages.
If you're having a problem with Magnatune, please email us and tell us what you're experiencing, and I'll jump on it right away.
The server upgrade was needed because of greatly increased use of our music since Magnatune became an all-subscriber service five months ago. Unsurprisingly, since Magnatune members can stream and download whatever they want, our services are used much more than when we used to sell one-album-at-a-time.
This is great, as it means all the music I've approved over the past 8 years is getting listened to. It also meant we needed to upgrade our server to handle all this music listening -- this is a good thing!
I know it sounds unbelievable, but until this past Wednesday Magnatune was running on the same server we started on nine years ago. The hard drives storing the music have been upgraded several times, and the OS upgraded as far as it would go on that motherboard (to Ubuntu 7.04), but Magnatune was running on a dual-CPU (an Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.2ghz), 3gb RAM machine. The new server has 24gb of RAM, 8 CPU cores, a big SSD drive, and is running Ubuntu v10.04 64bit. The new load average is 0.28 (down from about 3.0), so we have plenty of spare capacity for growth.
So worry not, ye Magnatune fans, we're doing ok and are in no danger of disappearing.