The Ensembl mirror for US West will be retired at the end of January 2023, at the time of Ensembl release 109.
We will shortly add a banner to the top of the Ensembl US West site. If you can see that banner when using Ensembl then you are affected. Please keep on reading to find out more information on how US West retirement may affect you.
- If you are currently redirected to uswest.ensembl.org automatically because it’s the closest mirror to your geographical location, you will now be redirected to our US East mirror instead. If you were not automatically redirected to US West but explicitly chose to use that mirror, you won’t be automatically redirected to US East. Rather, if you try to visit the US West mirror after its retirement you’ll see a simple page with links to the other Ensembl websites.
- If you have previously signed in to your Ensembl account when using the site and have associated data with this account, then these will continue to be available on all Ensembl sites after the retirement. These can include bookmarks, configurations, and the results of running various jobs, such as Blast.
- If you’ve uploaded data into the US West site to view alongside Ensembl data, e.g. BED files, these data files will no longer be accessible. If you created shareable URLs for such data in US West, those URLs will no longer work after the mirror is removed. Shareable URLs for data in the other mirrors or the main EBI website will continue to work. Similarly, any URLs for BioMart results that you created in US West will no longer work. Please make sure that you have downloaded any BioMart results to your own computer before the retirement date.
When our AWS mirrors were originally set up it made sense to locate infrastructure in both West and East Coast US, in order to provide good response times from both geographical locations. However, as intra- and inter-national network speeds have improved, the benefits of having two US mirrors have gradually diminished. Removing our US West mirror allows us to invest more into our remaining AWS infrastructure, helping to ensure that Ensembl can continue to serve our expanding user-base and our services can continue to scale to ever-increasing data volumes.
If you have any questions about the retirement of US West, please get in touch via our helpdesk.