Over the coming days and weeks we will be switching servers from Linode to our own hardware. The first switch will take place tomorrow. This will also require some DNS changes but you just keep using the same URLs that you are using today. Other than that services should look and behave exactly as they do now. There may well be minor disruptions to connections and we ask you to please bear with us if they occur. There will be pauses of a day or more in between each service being switched over, while we continue to monitor that everything is working as expected.
Moving the data from a live server to a new server means that there will be a finite time between making a backup and installing it on the new server. The site will indicate that maintenance is being carried out. That implies that posts made during this interval will be lost. The process will begin around 1600 UTC on Monday 28 October. We will attempt to make the switch over as quickly as possible and there should always be a live server online. If you lose access to the site completely remember that you can still contact us via email ('nickname' [@] soylentnews.org), on IRC, or by shouting VERY loudly.
If your comment is lost please do not believe those in the community who will no doubt claim that comments are being intentionally deleted. They are not (unless you are one of our small number of persistent spammers).
Once each switch is completed I would hope that we can inform you immediately. However, that might not always be possible - everyone has to sleep sometime! Please make any observations regarding problems, or even compliments if the system is responding better than before, in the comments for this Meta. However, our testing so far indicates that the new servers are more responsive than the existing servers but of course they have not yet been placed under quite the same load.
UPDATE: You should all be accessing the new server. Please let us know if you experience any problems. A big thank-you to kolie!.
(Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Sunday October 27, @12:37PM
I think the master plan for the main transition is to make the current site a static page that says "Moving servers, please try back in a few minutes" while the currently-live database is being backed up, transferred and then restored onto the new server. You won't be able to post.
While watching Kolie do multiple test runs over the past week, he seems to have got the time to run his backup, transfer and restore procedure scripts down to about 15 minutes total. Your particular DNS lineage may take a few extra minutes to propagate the destination address change.
There should be minimal downtime. You should just see either a "Please wait, moving servers" if you're still hitting the current, old server or see the site running on the new hardware, looking normal and fully functional.
(Note that if you manually, intentionally post anything to the new "testing" server before he does the live migration on Monday, those posts will obviously be lost when he loads the real, live database onto what is currently the "testing" server, soon to become the main live one.)