The Landing will be unavailable from 8pm MST, Friday 12th February, 2021, for a database system upgrade. We anticipate that it will be offline for around 2 hours, but it may take a little less time, and it may take longer if things do not go as planned. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes. 

Why we are doing this

We hope that this upgrade to the underlying database management system will make the site more stable than it has been since midnight on January 10th, when it catastrophically crashed for the first of 4 times over the past month, leading to many hours (and, on two occasions, over a day) of downtime. Though we have already stabilized the immediate problem, this upgrade should make these or similar problems less likely to occur in the first place and, if they do reoccur, should greatly reduce the down-time they cause. 

The database upgrade also brings us a step closer to implementing other improvements to the site that have been waiting in the wings for some years now (though that are still some way from completion), and it should lead to slight overall gains in performance, security, and stability.

The Landing Team