Malaysiakini will be accessible free of charge from 7pm today for 24 hours. No login will be required.

However, subscribers will not be able to post comments, while subscription payments cannot be accepted for the duration.

The downtime is due to the migration of the subscription management system - known as Manage4me.com - to its new home on the cloud. With cloud hosting, the subscription engine is expected to be more stable and less susceptible to attacks.

The technical team hopes to have the service up and running by 7pm tomorrow, at which time login, commenting and subscription payments will be reactivated.

During the downtime, readers can leave comments on Malaysiakini's Facebook page . This will be used for compilation of comments under 'Yoursay'.

The move is the last step in Malaysiakini's migration to using cloud services.

Following a series of DDOS attacks, our web services were moved to the Microsoft Azure platform in 2010 and have since migrated to the Google cloud. Last year, advertising services, Kinibiz and KiniTV were similarly moved to the cloud.

More information about cloud computing and hosting is available here .