We're moving

Hi folks, Joe here.

You've probably noticed Blipfoto struggling with the amount of traffic it's been receiving lately - the site's been slowing down during the busier times, and occasionally taking itself completely offline when demand gets too high.

The only real solution is to move Blipfoto to a completely new home, which has enough capacity to deal with current demand and plenty more on tap for the future. (We're seeing double the traffic we did six months ago - if that trend continues we're certainly going to need it.)

So I'm very pleased, after many months of looking for exactly the right place, to announce that our new home (pictured) is now ready for us to move in.

This first big step towards the Blipfoto of the future has been helped massively by the founding members, and means we can finally begin to roll out the member features we announced in February.

But moving Blipfoto is no mean feat - the amount of material the site holds and the way it's constantly added to means we have no option but to switch everything off while we make the move. We've scheduled this to start at 9am UK time this coming Thursday, 11 June, and aim to be complete by late afternoon. We will be doing a bit of fiddling around between now and then, so if there are any problems, please bear with us and rest assured that all will soon be well again.

If there's any change to this plan, we'll announce it here on the Blipblog. And if there are any problems or delays while we're flying round the dark side of the moon, keep an eye on our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/Blipfoto

Finally, while we're on the subject of the Blipfoto of the future, I'd also like to take this opportunity to let you know that Blipfoto's very own iPhone app (which lets you upload directly from the phone) is just about ready for launch. I've been playing around with it myself for the last couple weeks and think it's going to be a wonderful new complement to the site.

Before we do launch, we have a limited number of beta copies to give away - if you're interested in taking it for a spin, drop us a line.

That's it - onwards and upwards!