Brief server upgrades August 2019 (completed)

Update August 21, 2019: The maintenance described below has been completed for all sites.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be retiring some old servers and moving sites on those servers to new (often faster) ones. Migrating a site takes just a few seconds in most cases, so it’s likely that neither you nor your visitors will notice this happening.

If someone does view your site while it’s being migrated, they’ll see a maintenance screen with a link to this blog post, like this:

If your site is in the small minority that has a large database (more than a few hundred MB), the migration could take a little longer — perhaps a few minutes. We try to do migrations during slow periods for each site, minimizing the impact on visitors.

Are there any technical changes?

Customers should not notice any difference after this maintenance, except that in some cases your site may run faster. The main technical change is that the old servers were still using some 32-bit programs even though the Linux kernel was 64-bit; the new servers are entirely 64-bit. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to worry about it.

We apologize for the inconvenience if you, or a visitor, does see the maintenance notice. We strive to minimize any downtime.

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions.