Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer website for computer programmers, has officially exited its data center in New Jersey as part of its cloud migration effort.

In a blog post published at the end of December, Stack noted that for the past 16 years it had been operating out of a physical data center in which the site reliability engineer (SRE) team had to manage all the operations including "physical servers, cabling, racking, replacing failed disks, and everything else in between."

"This work required someone to physically show up at the data center and poke the machines," the post said.

In August 2025, the company revealed plans to move the entirety of its workloads to the cloud. The company said it had been on a long journey from its early "scrappy days" when it was running on a single machine.

Stack previously migrated its "Stack Overflow for Teams" instances over 2021 and 2023, though the company said that this was rife with issues – taking three years and three attempts to manage. Writing in August, the company noted that it aimed for things to go more smoothly this time.

The data center exit actually occurred earlier this year. Having decommissioned a site in Colorado in June, which was primarily for disaster recovery, attention was turned to the New Jersey site, the lease for which was ending in late July.

Details about Stack's data center operator have not been shared, but previous posts have suggested the company migrated from Oregon to a QTS data center in New York/New Jersey in 2010. QTS operates three sites across New Jersey in East Windsor, Jersey City, and Piscataway.

Stack Overflow has also previously made reference to a Fortrust data center in Denver. Iron Mountain acquired Fortrust in 2017.

In a post to Stack Exchange from July, the company noted that its hardware had approached the end-of-support date and would need to be refreshed, and that "maintaining our data centers was becoming a distraction."

Importantly, Stack emphasised that while replacing hardware would be expensive, the migration is not to save money. "We know that cloud is often more expensive than running your own hardware," the company said, adding that "the cost is worth the new flexibility."

While the company is hosting the Teams offering with Microsoft, the latest cloud migration has seen Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network migrating to Google Cloud. The migration has been dubbed "Project Ascension," and had been under discussion since the end of 2023.

The company had around 50 servers in the New Jersey data center. On July 2, the SRE team "unracked all the servers, unplugged all the cables, and gave these once mighty machines their final curtain call." Each machine was connected by eight or more cables – Ethernet cables of varying types, power cables, and a cable that took video and USB signals to a KVM switch – the latter installed to enable the company to virtually visit their servers.

Speaking on the exit, Josh Zhang, Stack's staff SRE, said: "I installed the new web tier servers a few years ago as part of planned upgrades. It's bittersweet that I'm the one deracking them also.”

Stack has since disposed of the equipment, which enabled them to move "quickly" with "no need to be gentle," as per director of reliability engineering Ellora Praharaj.

With all workloads now in the cloud, Stack sums up the exit with the following: "Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware. Not after last week."

Stack Overflow launched in 2008, created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It was sold in 2021 for $1.8bn to Prosus.