First, the good news...

We did it.  We moved Kompoz to new bigger and better servers.  You will notice faster uploads, faster browsing (page loads), greatly improved up-time, and more overall stability.  Kompoz is now hosted on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure -- the same infrastructure where amazon.com itself, and countless other high-traffic sites are hosted.   EC2 provides us with scalability, redundancy, and reliability.  We're really excited about this.

Now, the bad news...

We had not planned to move when we did.  We had actually planned to move this weekend, and it was only going to take a couple of hours.  Instead, Murphy's Law kicked our ass.  What happened is so unbelievable.  Four days before we had planned to move, and after four years of running without issue on the same server, the primary disk drive on the server that stored the project art and member profile photos failed.  Just died.  You just can't make this stuff up.

So we were forced to move before we had finished our migration plans.  We had not even finished configuring the new servers at EC2 when the drive failed.  We had to scramble to setup the servers (there are four primary servers), install the operating systems, configure the load balancer, and migrate the database.  And then, during the mad rush, we ran into a snag with the audio transcoder (this is software that allows us to convert WAV, AIF, WMA, OGG, MP3 and other audio files to other formats).  It would not work on the new systems, so we had to totally re-write that component.  

Current State of Affairs

You're reading this, which means that the site is obviously up and running.  The new servers are humming along.  But we're not finished.  There are still things to fix. 

These are the outstanding items:

• The member photos and album art are glaringly not yet loaded.  As I lamented above, they were on the drive that failed.  We're working with a very good data recovery firm that specializes in recovering data from damaged drives, and we're confident we'll get them back.  Unfortunately, this may take another week or so.  But please, please, please don't wait -- upload new profile photos and album art.  It would really help us out if you could upload new profile photos and album art!
• Email notifications are turned off for the moment.  This means you will not get an email when new tracks are uploaded to your projects, or when you receive new Private Messages.  We're working on setting up new mail servers.  This should be up and running before Monday.
• Private Messages sent and new tracks uploaded on Tuesday and Wednesday may be lost.  This is the most regrettable piece of the story.  Our last backup on Monday night was recovered, but the Tuesday backup failed.  So we lost about 24 hours of data.