[Alex Pepple]

I have some operational news for everyone--

1) First, I want to thank everyone who contributed in the recent support reminder (here). Unfortunately, contributions received thus far have been far and few between.

2) This brings me to the second announcement that this is a heads-up that I'm planning to move the server to a new hosting company as soon as I can manage it. The main reason for the move is that the current company has become just too expensive for me to finance (especially, if we're going to keep keeping everything as we've been doing on the Able Muse/Eratosphere since the beginning days, while keeping the infrastructure up-to-date!); albeit, the company that's become too expensive and that I'm now forced to leave is one of the best in the business, especially so with a recent acquisition by IBM. But, something had to give to leave the lights on down the road while maintaining the level of system resource and performance we're used to having here on the Sphere, and this is it. Hopefully, the new company will be reasonably/sufficiently competent and reliable: they've been shaky on my initial tests and research, but between their skills and mine, we should be fine ... hopefully! Still, one bit of good news for the new company, is that I'm able to rent a lot more server storage, memory, and bandwidth for slightly less, and this should translate to better system performance in the long run.

3) And this brings me to the third notice to let you know of a forthcoming server downtime, needed to migrate the server, along with all the system and user data (yes, yours included!) to the new hosting company. Of course, I'll try to back everything up before the move, and try to complete the transfer with any data loss. However, since there's no 100% guarantee with computers and networks (or hosting companies for that matter), I'm letting you know so that if there's any post that is critical for you, that you somehow save it now somewhere safe ... just in case.

Once I have more news especially when the server will go offline (along with Able Muse/Eratosphere) to enable the transfer, and an estimate of how long the blackout will last, I'll let everyone know.

Cheers,
...Alex