Inside LabourStart

Next Tuesday at 09:00 London time we’ll be moving LabourStart’s campaigns over to a new server based in Iceland.  In previous posts here I’ve explained why we’re doing that, but to sum up:

• Keeping the campaigns and news on the same server means that if the campaigns cause a problem (e.g., a target threatens libel or accuses us of spamming them) our web hosting company freaks out and threatens to shut us down (and has shut us down).  Separation means this will not happen again.
• When a new campaign gets announced to our 70,000+ strong English mailing list, the immediate flood of supporters can crash our server.  When both campaigns and news were on one server, this meant that LabourStart’s news pages became inaccessible, correspondents were unable to login, and so on.  This should not be the case after the switchover.

I expect there to be bugs and problems, but the actual down-time should be very short if everything is prepared correctly.  Nevertheless, expect that from 09:00 until 10:00 on Tuesday morning in London, our campaigns may be offline.