Next week Pronto will be making a major update to our platform. In this update we will be upgrading to WordPress 3.1 and also moving to a new infrastructure.

We have spent considerable time over the last six months reviewing our infrastructure, code base and plans for the future. There are a number of areas in terms of performance, scalability and extensibility that we wanted to improve upon, and this update is the first crucial step in that process. This fully redundant, highly scalable infrastructure gives us a solid platform from which to drive performance improvements and optimizations over the coming months. In addition, we have a host of development projects queued up now that we’re on WordPress 3.1.

This has been a major undertaking for us. We have had a super infrastructure and development team working with us for the past two months on this project. Our mantra from beginning-to-end has been “do it right.” The testing phase we undertook in the past weeks has been the most intense we’ve ever done, where we repeat the migration process into the new infrastructure, then having both manual and automated testing to look for issues, fix them and then run the migration again.

At last we’re extremely confident in making this migration without downtime or issues. We currently have this scheduled for Monday May 16. The timing will be very early morning for the UK, and middle of the night for the US. We don’t expect you’ll notice this migration, however as things propagate there could be the normal short-lived caching and slow page load issues that you’d expect in a move such as this.

It is possible that across all of our client’s sites, in spite of the rigorous testing, small issues may pop-up here and there. If you see anything on your site that seems out of the ordinary or isn’t working right, please let us know immediately.

After the move we’ll be sending you information on how to change your DNS settings. It is important that you do this as soon as possible. We’ll provide detailed instructions; it will just take a few minutes of your time.

I can’t say how excited we are about how well this project has gone, and the new platform we’re going to have your websites on. There are a long list of optimizations for performance and feature enhancements to our services and your sites that this enables – we’re eager to get started.

If you have any questions or concerns, be sure to let me know.

Regards,

Derek