On Saturday at 8 AM PT, the tech team will be moving Daily Kos from its current web host to Amazon's Web Services. We'll be taking the site down for an estimated one to three hours while we move our data over to the new servers and update the DNS (the system that tells your browser where our servers are when you ask for a page from dailykos.com). The DNS changes could take different amounts of time for people in different regions of the country (or parts of the world).
Why the big move? Daily Kos has long relied heavily on "real iron" servers, which are what you imagine when you think of big machines hosting big websites: boxes in a rack in a data center somewhere that have our name on it. By moving to Amazon, we'll instead exclusively inhabit so-called "virtual machines" in the famous "cloud." In other words, Daily Kos will live in a slice of Amazon's vast network of servers, without being tied to any one specific box as we are now.
Under our old setup, Daily Kos was vulnerable during events like Hurricane Sandy (which actually knocked the site partly offline for a time); with Amazon, we'll have a much easier time dealing with such events. Even better, we'll be taking advantage the flexibility of virtual machines and a world-class data center that offers robust safeguards against failure and will allow us to quickly grow (or "scale," in industry parlance) to meet our traffic needs with ease. This should mean better uptime, faster page loads, quicker response to traffic spikes and outages, speedier deployment of new features, and better-rested, happier developers.
We are also doing a large number of major software system upgrades in the process, covering everything from better "visibility tools" that allow us to chart the site's performance, to a faster, more modern version of Ruby, the programming language that powers all the upcoming new features at Daily Kos. This is the last major planned outage before we upgrade our site's own software, but you'll have to wait to hear more from Markos on that!