Daniel asked me to do a writeup and let everyone know what is going on.

Yes, you read the headline right: AOA is getting a new server.

This day has been a long time in coming; it's been almost 3 years since our last server upgrade, and our server was getting a bit long in the tooth.  In addition, it was costing us a fair chunk of change.

Our new server is going to provide us with twice the file storage we have now, roughly 40% more CPU horsepower, about 20% more monthly download cap, and will actually cost us LESS than the one we are on now.  How's that for a bargain?

So, how did we get here?  Very simple; you believed in us.  Through a combination of your monthly subscriptions, articles that you have submitted for publication, and other contributions that you have made to AOA, as well as a LOT of hard work and a focused goal on the part of AOA staff, we have been able to scrape together the resources necessary to get us to this new server.  The end result is that we will be able to provide superior service to our users while also reducing our overhead, and that is a win for everyone.

Over the course of the next few days, there will be periods of time where AOA is offline while we move things from one server to the other.  Where possible, or where the outage will be prolonged, we will try to provide advanced warning in the forums of when and how long AOA will be offline.

Our current working plan is to try to get this all wrapped up over the weekend and be up and running on our bright shiny new server Monday.

Feel free to comment in the forums!