PSA: Livejournal downtime

Next Tuesday, from about 16.00, all Livejournal powered blogs and services will be down for approximately 4 hours. You know what? That's a damn good thing. Last year, when I was considering not renewing my paid account, my principle reason was:

Competing blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have a multiple redundancy system for its hosting, so that if one centre fails there are backups elsewhere; specifically, they do not trust all their data security to one location situated the wrong side of a major fault line.

They're moving the servers and location that all of Livejournal is stored on from San Francisco, a beautiful city due to fall into the sea at some point very soon, to a place called Billings in the middle of Montana. They're also, medium term, planning a co-location centre so that there's a backup server farm in case something happens to the main one.

Oh, last time they relocated the servers, there was some issue with spam filters as LJ's current IP is whitelisted, they'll hopefully have sorted things out but comment notifications might go missing for a few days...

So, y'know, no LJ next Tuesday afternoon. Guess I'll have to stay in the pub...