UPDATE: We’re running a few minutes behind, but we still expect this to go through tonight. Thanks for your patience.

As you may have noticed, our Web sites have been running a little bit slowly lately.

There’s two reasons for that and hopefully both will be resolved with a little maintenance at 11 p.m. tonight.

First, our traffic has increased dramatically in the past few months, as has the amount of video we create and you watch. All of that has put an increasingly large load on our media server (that’s the server that houses the photos, the videos, all of the stuff that makes this Web site fun and exciting). In order to alleviate that, several months ago we purchased a new media server with more space and more horsepower.

And here’s where the second problem occurs. In order to get all of the content off of our old media server and onto our new server, we had to periodically sync the content on the two. When that process was underway and when traffic was highest, sometimes the site became especially — and intolerably — slow.

Tonight, we hope, we turn off the old server and move full-time to the new one. In order to do that, though, we’ll have to turn the Web sites off for a short time — we hope just a few minutes or less even. Please bear with us as we get things back in order.

We’ve also purchased other new servers that we anticipate hooking up in time for any traffic spike we might see from KU’s run to the NCAA tournament. Should hooking up those servers require additional downtime in the next few weeks, we’ll let you know here.

Thanks for your patience and feel free to leave any questions in the comments below, or contact me via e-mail.