There are multiple things that need to be considered here:
1. We are purchasing a dedicated physical server. VPSs are usually configured automatically upon purchase. Dedicated server on the other hand are often not auto configured.
2. Incidents are being managed and taken care of 24x7.  But a purchase is not an incident and thus they typically only work Mon-Fri.

Having said that, our platform went from 4000+ visits a day to over 20000 visits a day yesterday. Obviously that was very much unexpected otherwise we would ofcourse have taken actions earlier.

Status update:

- they wont bring up the servers due to the high load
- we have just ordered a large new physical dedicated server from the provider, but they cant get us an ETA, with weekend right ahead I worry that it wont be ready before they go into the weekend.

Worst case scenario:  Server becomes available for us: Monday afternoon.  Application migration and testing probably done by Monday night.

Not real.

We got word from the service provider, looks like the sudden spike in the past 2 days has blown the gasket, the server hosting provider is asking us to scale the app, i.e. move it to new bigger physical servers.   

Be prepared for a longer downtime this weekend.

All discussion are going on in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49383.100

We have contacted the datacenter provider to investigate why the server won't boot up. Their response isn't quite as fast as we would wish it to be.

System is down, we are working on it.

I'll test it out cause I cant get the upgrade to 8.1 done without the new wallet telling me 30% less coins.  Hence my approach, dump key, import keys.

Thanks.

Short question, can the tool work on an offline wallet?  Does it modify the wallet in any way, I only want to dump all addresses/privkeys and acount names, not more.

There should be a Google-Captcha box appearing. If it is not it cound be for various reasons:
 - which country are you in?  I had the experience personally (dont want to mention the country here) where the Google services often where interrupted
 - any specific features in your web browser that you might have activated to block 3rd party contents on our page
 - slow network performance

Am I the only one who has problems upgrading the wallet to 0.8.1?

I have tried it now like a dozen times, all sorts of combinations, everytime the same issue, 30% of the coins missing.

My new approach would be:
Dump all accounts, privkeys from the old wallet
Get a clean 8.1 installation and import all the privkeys.


Anyone got a tool that dumps all existing accounts and their associated privkeys in a nice list?

Otherwise my current approach would be:
  bitcoind listaccounts
to get all the accounts
then
  bitcoind getaddressesbyaccount "account"
and then
  bitcoind dumpprivkey "address"

Any conerns with the above approach?

I am at 2.9GB now and growing.  Is this normal?

The alternative would be not to credit any deposits lower than a specified threshhold, e.g.  < 0.01 BTC   Thus anyone sending less will not get the coins credited.  Best even, some sort of reorg function on the wallet.

Lowering the fees at this point in time is not possible. Check out this:
        "category" : "send",
        "amount" : -0.70072277,
        "fee" : 0.61118872,

Since we added the optional fee to speed up network processing, we pay redicilous amounts of fees. The reason is that we have tons of tiny deposits (probably P2P mining or other mining results).   These thousands of small transactions are are driving the fees up.

We would have to stop supporting the reuse of deposit addresses in order to do that.

I upgraded my wallet to 0.8.1 and now:
 - coins are missing
 - memory consumptions shows 2.6GB

I did the upgrade twice, both times the same result:
1. Try:
 - on a new computer install the 0.8.1 version
 - start it and let it download the complete blockchain (into the brand new wallet)
 - stop bitcoind
 - replace the wallet .dat with my "real" wallet.dat (which I created using backupwallet)
 - set txindex=1
 - start bitcoind with the parameter -reindex
 
2. Try:
 - on a new computer install the 0.8.1 version
 - copy "real" wallet.dat (which I created using backupwallet) into the data directory
 - set txindex=1 in the conf file
 - start bitcoind

What went wrong? 
a) Why are the number of bitcoins reported with getinfo different from my new and my old system?
b) The process shows 2.6GB !!!! memory usage. It used to be around 600 to 800MB

I believe that I have made suggestions on the changes to the text in the subsequent thread communication addressing some of the concerns. If there are further, let me know.

The number of Ad Banners is probably too many,  ok, here the suggestion:  Ad-banners are optional; none, one or several may be submitted. Obviously submitting an Ad might tip the scale when its a close call to decide the winner.

How about another add-on:  All people submitting work may opt-in an official publishing of their work. I.e. Once all work is submitted, I will show them all (ofcourse only those who specifically have agreed to it) in this thread. This will help bringing more transparency into the selection process and offers a marketing platform for the user who submitted a work but might not have won.

Since about 2 days transactions without fees are getting delayed, sometime up to several hours. This hasn't happened before. Anyone know what's going on?  Any new big miner who requires fees or too many transactions on the network?

Well, the point is, that the ownership of the work is transferred to Vircurex, hence the owner would have (and should have) no more interest in tracking his creation.

But I believe I see where this is going. So how about the following change:

Ownership of the submitted artwork remains with the creator. The artwork may have watermarks.
Once the winner is chosen, the ownership of the winning submission only is transferred to Vircurex. The creator is then to submit a version of all provided art without watermark after which he will receive the prize.

This is an honest offer, so let me know what you think should be changed and I am more than willing to change it accordingly.

Vircurex Logo/Ad Banner contest, earn 4BTC, details at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=165857.0