IMPORTANT: Site Downtime in March

[MDGarcia]

Folks:

Slicehost, our current provider, was sold last year to Rackspace.  This means that soon, Rackspace will be moving us to their cloud infrastructure and jacking up the price, which is not good for us.  Given that the donations have been zero these past couple of months, I'm footing the bill 100% and I can't rightly afford the increase in the monthly costs for all the additional services we've added to Ad Astra (Email/Blogs/Images).  To that end, we're shopping for a new provider who will help us reduce costs or at least provide better or more services at the same current cost.  Through my contacts, we believe we've found a reliable host at pricing levels that are way more affordable than what Rackspace will be charging us monthly.

But, this also means that Ad Astra will be down while we move all the data over.  When I say down, I mean locked out.  Until the DNS changes are done, we will have to prevent changes to the databases for the archive, forums, and blogs.  Once we're satisfied that everything is up to date, we will unlock the databases and return to normal services.

I will update with information regarding the exact time/date of the move, but it will likely be in a couple of weeks.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

MDg

[jespah]

Question - I have blog posts scheduled to go out in March. Should I reschedule them? It's no trouble; I want to make this as easy for you as possible. Thanks!

[MDGarcia]

Answer - You don't have to do that.  Once it's in the database, it's fine.  It's going to be changes made while we're doing data moves that'll be problematic.  Scheduled blog posts are already in there, no changes are necessary.

MDg

[MDGarcia]

Update:  We've moved ahead with the new server purchases.

MDgf

[MDGarcia]

Update #2: We have tentatively scheduled the switchover for the weekend of March 10th.

MDg