A yellow box with the text "UNDER CONSTRUCTION", bookended by a striped yellow and black bar and a construction worker yellow road sign. The worker in the sign is moving their shovel up and down from a pile of dirt in front of them. — We too miss GeoCities.

There are two seasons in Seattle: there’s the rainy season, and then there’s construction season. We at LDH have been serenaded by the sounds of jackhammers, backhoes, and excavators outside our office windows.

It’s also construction season on the LDH web presence! Thanks to a series of recent events, we will be doing some website work in the coming week. Here is what you can expect as we don our hard hats and break out the shovels on the website.

What’s Going On?

The significant change to our online presence will be our web hosting service. We currently use Webfaction for both web hosting and email services; however, Webfaction is closing down its web hosting service. Originally our web hosting was supposed to be migrated by Webfaction to another web host; however, the migration failed because of an incompatibility with the new web host. The failed migration leaves us at LDH to find a new home.

Luckily, we quickly identified a new home for our website and email service with our current domain host, Namecheap. We do not extensively collect personally identifiable information on our website, but we still wanted a hosting service that will protect our site and email data, such as not providing data to law enforcement without a court-issued order. It also helps that Namecheap has a history of advocacy around internet privacy matters, such as the campaign against CISPA and partnerships with the EFF and noyb.

What to Expect

On Sunday August 15^th, starting at 7 am Pacific Daylight Time, we will migrate the LDH website and email service to our new web host. We will do our best to minimize downtime for both our website and email throughout the day. We expect the migration to be completed by Monday, August 16^th.

Sounds simple enough, right? As anyone in technology will tell you, migrations have a mind of their own. It’s always good to have a backup plan when things fail (like having an incident response plan even when you have the best information security tools and practices at your disposal). If our site migration fails, we will post on the blog detailing the next steps for the website and how to reach LDH as we continue our journey to a new web host. If the migration is successful, then it is business as usual 😊

We thank you in advance for your patience during this time.

A one-eyed black cat curled up on the seat of a couch, looking up with her front paws curled under her head. — The Executive Assistant preparing to supervise the migration.