Our current datacenter is in New York City. Yep, where they make all that great salsa. So whenever you make a request to any Stack Exchange site, the internet tubes must connect from your location to our datacenter in NYC. We are not (yet) immune to the laws of physics, so depending on the distance between you and NYC this ... can take a while.

In 2003, Fog Creek Software (aka Joel’s other baby) moved offices, and decided to ditch its internal T1 and look for a colocation provider. Joel was impressed with PEER 1 Hosting’s customer service, the shiny new data center in NYC, and PEER 1 Hosting even volunteered to host Joel on Software – for free!

As part of our datacenter migration, the database server received a substantial upgrade:

This Saturday, October 23rd, starting at about 2 PM Pacific, we will be migrating all of our primary sites from the Corvallis, OR datacenter to the New York, NY datacenter.

As you may have noticed many of Stack Overflow's websites suffered some down time today from 6am EDT for about an hour and Stackoverflow.com is still offline for maintenance. Our collocation provider in Oregon experienced an unexpected UPS failure that caused us to lose power. Once they were able to restore power Geoff, who was already on site, brought up our servers. Stack Overflow itself is still offline because the database, was, well "suspect" according to SQL Server. We have recovered the database and are working to bring it live again.