Asherons Call: Why Move the Databases?

AC Executive Producer Jessica Mulligan has posted a thread on the official AC boards explaining just why there's been so much downtime lately as Turbine moves the AC databases--basically, better safe than sorry:

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What the Heck is All This Database Moving, Anyway?

We've been having a lot of planned outages lately and one unplanned outage, and I wanted to give you a quick update on why we're moving four of the worlds to new database hardware now.

The basic upshot is this: The player databases for Darktide, Morningthaw, Harvestgain and Wintersebb were all on some really old, long-in-the-tooth hardware when we inherited the equipment as part of the recent buy-back of the game. We understood that and ordered new hardware specifically to handle this; we were afraid the machines would just up and die one day and that would be ugly, indeed.

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You can read the rest of the post here.