KDL Infrastructure Migration - Temporary Site Turnoffs

Aerial View of Flamingos on Dried Lake
Photo by Esra Bürçün

UPDATE 29 November 2024:

The migration is nearing completion and we have been able to reduce the number of sites impacted. We can confirm that we will need to temporarily turn off the dynamic versions of the following sites. However, we have been able to set up static snapshots in the interim. The functionality of these is more limited - for example, search functions will not work. They will, however, allow users to access significant portions of these sites while we work on getting the full versions restored:


Due to an infrastructure migration and upgrade KDL must temporarily shut down a few of the sites we host from Monday, 2 December. We’re coming to the end of a major project to move to new server infrastructure. Our digital estate, which includes around 85 research websites, as well as associated support systems and services, will now be hosted “in house” on the King’s College London e-Research infrastructure. This modernisation will improve how we host sites, making our digital estate more stable and increasing long-term sustainability.

As described on our Archiving and Sustainability page, KDL inherited a wide range of digital research projects and websites, spanning decades of digital humanities research at King’s. Since then, we’ve added new and innovative projects to our estate. This means that we host sites with diverse methodologies and technologies, and each of the sites we host must be individually packaged and migrated to the new infrastructure. The process includes making any routine server or application updates and checking the project in a testing environment before we can make it live on the new infrastructure, all of which takes a significant amount of time.

We will need to temporarily turn off a small set of remaining sites from 2 December. We expect all sites to be available by spring 2025 and will provide a further update in early 2025.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and we encourage users to complete any searches or investigations they have in progress before the end of November 2024, to minimise effect on their work.

Below is the list of sites likely to be affected:

by Pamela Mellen on