Hey guys, I just wanted to apologize for the slowdown and system errors the past week or so. I'm on WordPress.com constantly and the problems have been incredibly annoying.

We've been quiet for a few weeks because all development effort has been heads down on preparing for this new transition, think of it like WordPress.com 1.1.

We're creating a perfect mirror of our entire infrastructure in a new datacenter in Dallas to replicate what we currently have going in San Diego. Basically what we're going for is redundancy at a very high level. The problem is no matter how much money you spend on hardware, switches, and all the hundreds of other things that keep everything running you can really only be certain of one thing — that it'll fail at some point, most likely when you least expect it.

We had originally planned for this new hardware to come online more than a month ago, which would have prevented the errors we've all been experiencing, but it has taken longer than expected. This is my fault and I'm sorry for not getting things moving sooner.

By creating this first mirror in Dallas, we're trying to eliminate as many things that could fail as possible, so in theory if California fell into the ocean we could still keep the site running without any problems and slowdowns. (Besides the fact that Barry, Ryan, Toni, and I are in California! But even we're geographically distributed — Andy, Podz, and Donncha would be okay.)

We're in the very final stages of bringing the new systems online, just waiting the last few bits of configuration to come online. As we're more than doubling the servers we're using, it should address all performance issues and help us prevent any for a long time to come. This means we can get back to doing things we love, like adding cool new features and themes for you. Thanks for your patience, we'll have things back to normal as soon as possible.