MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: Downtime Ahead!

Hi Everyone,

You may have noticed that we have been a little quiet for the past week or so, and that Uvumi Groups have not yet been launched. Well, here's what's going on, and this will affect the entire website in the coming week or so.

The data center where our servers are located is changing locations, which, needless to say, is potentially disastrous for Uvumi.com. This news comes on such short notice that it has created a Do or Die situation here, mainly because their new location does not have space for us to move along with them. Also, the servers are located in northern California, yet we are based in Austin, Texas. Clearly, this is a big issue for us. We are faced with quite a dilemma, and our options seem to be either physically moving our servers to a new colocation facility (which would involve a lot of expensive travel as well as major downtime) or migrating Uvumi.com to "the cloud".

We have decided to go with the cloud option, and I am currently working on getting us up and running on Amazon's EC2 platform. This is a very, very big task and I will be working as many hours as I can physically handle over the next week to make it happen. Hopefully things will be smooth and I won't run into any major issues with this move, but there is a good chance that Uvumi.com will be offline for as long as 48 hours some time in the next 7-10 days. Obviously I will do the best I can to ensure that our downtime is limited to no more than an hour or so, but migrating from physical servers we own to virtual servers in the cloud may not be very easy, as Uvumi has a LOT of custom code and systems running on the back end and I am unsure if everything will port easily to Amazon's cloud.

Needless to say, Uvumi Groups will be put on hold until this move is complete. We have to prioritize the migration at this time, as it's more important to keep us up and running than it is to roll out new features right now.

I will post another announcement when I know the exact time we will be going offline for the final migration, and I expect Uvumi.com to be down for at least 1-2 hours when that time comes.

I sincerely hope you all will bear with us during this unfortunate situation. Frankly, this kind of thing is not supposed to happen. Data centers aren't supposed to change locations, ever. But we have to deal with the situation in front of us, and we have to do it fast to keep this thing alive.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for being part of Uvumi! We fully appreciate the fact that it's you, the community that resides here, who make up Uvumi.com, and without you we wouldn't exist! If you have any questions or anything, you can always email us at support@uvumi.com, though at this point we're going to be focusing on the migration, so we may not have a lot of time to respond for the next week or so.

Sincerely,
Marshall