06 Apr 11 ALA Connect Downtime on 4/7

As noted in the FY11 Timeline, we’ve been preparing to migrate ALA Connect to a more robust environment in order to restore chat service and handle the traffic we anticipate seeing for the Annual Conference Scheduler. The behind-the-scenes work is just about done, and we’re now gearing up to make the big move.

We’ll begin migrating Connect to the new servers at 7:00 pm Central time on Thursday, April 7, at which time the site will become unavailable. Once all of the content has been moved and everything checks out okay in the new environment, we’ll officially switch over to the new servers. The move should be complete by 9:00 pm Central time on Thursday, April 7, if all goes well.

You should then be able to access Connect again as soon as your internet service provider sees the new servers. This could take anywhere from five minutes to a few hours, but we expect it will be fairly quickly for most users. Once you can access Connect again, you’ll know you’re on the new site and can continue to use it as you normally would.

We’ll post periodic updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alaconnect and provide a final “all clear” signal on the ITTS News blog and the Connect home page when the migration has been completed and the site is once again live.

There will be no data loss, and you’ll still log in to Connect the same way you did the day before. The only thing that’s changing is the hosting environment and our ability to better handle traffic spikes. Please let us know if you have any questions about this.