Short story:

We're relocating the site to a new set of servers in preparation for Open Beta. This maintenance will cause 2-4 hours of downtime which may be longer for some users. This is scheduled to start at 8PM PDT (0300 GMT) on Sunday, March 29th, 2009.

Long story:

As part of our plans for the upcoming open beta, we have been working with our hosting provider Slicehost to make sure they have enough space for the systems we intend to deploy on their infrastructure.

We came to the conclusion that the current data center Dreamwidth is hosted in (in St. Louis) may not be the best location for us going forward. As such, we are going to be moving the virtual servers we are currently using to a data center in Dallas/Fort Worth. This maintenance is scheduled to take place this weekend.

This will be a disruptive maintenance. We will try to minimize the site downtime, but fully expect 2-4 hours of the site being "hard down" while we move the database and verify the new configuration works. Even after the site is back up at its new location, it will take some time for the DNS change to propagate.

We will try to minimize the impact of this downtime, but want everybody to be aware of it. Currently we are planning this event to happen Sunday evening at approximately 8PM PDT (0300 GMT).

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!