If you're a regular visitor to this site, you may have noticed signs of something afoot over the past week or so. Our home page sported a banner which spoke of maintenance and potential problems. Our forums were down for awhile; our blogs didn't get updated. We posted fewer stories than usual. The whole site went through a brief outage. A few other quirks came and went.
The disruptions were a (relatively minor) pain, but they were all for a good cause. For awhile now, the servers that PCWorld.com sits on have lived in a facility in far-off Santa Clara. And the above-mentioned glitches were unavoidable when we moved everything to a state-of-the-art data center located right here in our neighborhood in San Francisco, a few blocks from the PCW offices. Like all good data centers, the whole idea is to give you reliable, fast access to PCWorld.com; the less you think about it, the better it's doing its job.
Now that the move is complete and just about everything's back to normal, I wanted to give a little public credit to the members of our technology team who pulled this off. Special kudos to our Director of Network and Infrastructure, Sean Greathouse, our Senior System/Networks Administrator, Wil Schultz, and our Network/Systems Administrator, John Wang. And also to our modest CTO, Aaron Jones, who said that the above guys deserve all the credit for making sure the move went smoothly with the minimum possible impact on the site.
And thanks to you, too, for your patience. We like having our servers nearby, and I'm betting they'll happily live there for a long, long time to come...
