YO! I think I've got the server to a state where I can go ahead and move the forum over to it.

Here's the plan:

Mid-day tomorrow you might experience a few short outages while I move the database to the new server. This is in preparation for the move itself. While the site will be on the GoDaddy servers, the database will be on the new Amazon virtual server. I'll have to disable the forum during the period in which the data is transferred and imported. That'll last maybe 5 to 7 minutes. The SPOTTY outage might come while I'm figuring out firewall access. Rest assured that I'll figure it out quickly.

Why am I going through all that trouble? UPTIME, FOLKS! I hate outages MORE than you do! The plan is to have the forum functional on both the old and new systems, both operating off of the new database server. This is so your access won't be interrupted because your ISP is slow to update their DNS servers. Some internet providers can take up to a week to update DNS entries, which means you could be unable to access our systems for up to a week if I wasn't taking these precautions.

If ALL GOES WELL, tomorrow night I will be copying the files from the old system to the new. After that, I will be updating the DNS entry to point to the new server. Most folks will be using the new system by morning. By Thursday night of next week, I'll be moving the files from the old system to cold storage.

It is my hope that the entire outage will only last 10 minutes at most.

I'll leave comments open on this post for any concerns or questions you may have about the move.