Despite missing my original schedule by leaps and bounds, I’ve finalized plans to move my web servers.

This is going to cause an outage.

On Friday, April 20, at 10:00 pm CDT, you can expect the site to be unavailable for at least an hour.

In fact, I suspect it will be missing for longer than that (at minimum… two hours).  That’s because the server move requires new IP addresses, and new IP addresses require DNS updates, and DNS updates require propagation time across the web.

I’ve made changes to the DNS such that other servers should only cache the information for an hour.  I’m assuming they’ll all come back for updates before April 20, at which time they’ll all get new TTL and expiration times that will force them back every hour.

We’ll see how it goes.

Just keep in mind that the physical move alone will take about an hour.  After that, access to the site will be governed entirely by how quickly ISPs come back for DNS updates and the new IP addresses.

I hope sincerely to keep the impact to an absolute minimum.

We’ll see…