We're growing faster than ever, and as of last week are the largest online portfolio website in the world. To keep up with our astonishing growth, we're making huge upgrades to our web infrastructure. We've chosen to host with Rackspace, which runs a world-class data center hosting some of the largest websites on the Internet (LinkedIn, 37signals, Razorfish, etc.). We're stoked to host your portfolios with, arguably, the best data center in the world.

At 5PM EST this Sunday we’ll begin the upgrade by temporarily disabling portfolio administration and new sign-ups. Your portfolio will remain online. Once the final data synchronization is complete, we'll flip the switch and you'll be back in business. The migration should take no longer than an hour, and we'll be posting updates to Twitter throughout the process. If you have any questions, please e-mail us.

Update: Our move went flawlessly! All is well.

About six months ago we passed the 100,000 mark. Last week we reached 150,000 Carbonmade portfolios. It's been a busy past six months, to say the least, and things are moving at a fast pace around here. We moved into our new office with the boys (and girls) from Harvest and are hard at work on an update to Carbonmade. More on that coming soon.

Here are some photos of the new space we share:

And during our downtime:

Please follow us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, stay subscribed to our blog and e-mail us with any questions, suggestions, or comments. We love hearing from you guys. And thanks to Tim van Damme for taking these photographs for us.

Next week is Internet Week New York and on Tuesday, June 2nd, Dave and I (Spencer) will be presenting Carbonmade at the NY Tech Meetup Showcase. The event we are a part of is going on from 3:30 to 6:30 at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology’s Great Hall. The entrance is on 27th St between 7th & 8th, on the N side of the street.

We’d love it if you came by and chatted us up. I'm sure you’ll be able to twist our arm for a free Whoo! account here and there too. We're looking forward to meeting many of you in person. Shoot us an e-mail with any questions if you have 'em. The Showcase is entirely free and open to the public, so hopefully we'll see you there! We’ll be live tweeting from the event too.

I mentioned last month that you can use your own domain name for your portfolio on the Whoo! account and since then I've received a lot of emails. I thought I'd make it much easier for you all to set up your domain with us by explaining the process in a Frequently Asked Question. It's not the simplest procedure in the world -- the fault of domain registrars around the world -- but I think you'll find it easy enough to follow. Please e-mail us with any questions!

I thought I'd just take a minute to share with you a few simple things you can do to better market yourself on Carbonmade. It only takes a few minutes to do these things and it'll help you gain exposure. Keeping your portfolio up-to-date with new work is obviously the single most important thing, but there's other stuff you can do.

We're the first to admit that our portfolio search is a work in progress and doesn't always yield the most accurate results. But since it gets a lot of traffic from potential employers and others, it's helpful to fill out your About area. Specifically make sure to include your Location (e.g. New York, NY) and Areas of Expertise (Illustration, Photography, etc.). These terms are both used heavily in searches and easily clickable on the right-hand side of the search page. We get a lot of people searching for "New York illustrator" and other similar search pairs when hiring.

After finding your portfolio, potential employers and others will often read through your About area to learn more about you. You'll want to make sure you mark your portfolio as Available for Freelance or they may move on to the next person. It goes without saying that including a quick bio and a link to your e-mail are both important, especially the e-mail bit. A quick bio will help them learn more about the person behind the work. Remember you're "selling" yourself as a complete package, so filling out your entire portfolio will help when looking for a job.

I hope that helps!

A little unpublished secret here at Carbonmade is that you can use your own domain name if you're on the Whoo! account -- this removes the .carbonmade.com from your URL. You can see an example of that by checking out our very own Dave Gorum's portfolio. We don’t have the most elegant solution to setting you up on your own domain right now, but if you shoot an e-mail to us at support@carbonmade.com I'd be happy to help you. You'll need to register your own domain through GoDaddy or through one of the numerous domain providers out there. Enjoy!

Carbonmade reached 100,000 members last week. I was sick, so I didn’t have a chance to thank you all. We just want to say thanks for supporting us throughout these years. You’ve all been great friends and your kind e-mails and tweets have not gone unnoticed. We really appreciate it more than we can put into words.

We ran this little "share your Carbonmade story on your blog" contest a couple weeks back and we were overwhelmed with great entries. Your stories are always exciting for us to read. Reading stories like how Emily got a job in New York City with her Carbonmade portfolio and a phone interview -- because she couldn't afford to make the trip -- just brightens our day. Emily is great: she even praised us when we screwed up! She had written to the Consumerist a couple of weeks back about how "Carbonmade Quickly Responds To Error, Fixes It In Less Than 4 Hours." Too kind!

So thanks to all of you who wrote us with your stories. I want to specifically thank Emily, Jamie, Tim, and TracyLynn for their write-ups. All of you, and lots of others, have been upgraded to Wooh! free of charge! Thanks to everyone and please continue to share your stories with us via your blog, email, and/or Twitter. We're so happy to hear from you.

Having been in a generous mood lately, I thought I'd give away a few Wooh! Accounts to current Carbonmade people. We're actually running a fairly active Twitter account (please follow us) and have given out free accounts in the past when we've simply asked you to tweet out your portfolio to your followers. I thought we'd do something along the same lines with bloggers.

So here's how it will work. Many of you have blogs, so we thought we'd ask you to share your thoughts about Carbonmade on your blog (please make sure to include a link to your portfolio). Specifically, we want to hear about how you use Carbonmade and what you've gotten out of using it. Tell us a story! We love hearing stories like Keane Angle's a few months back.

We're going to run this contest over the next two weeks. The number of winners is not determined yet because we want to make it a ratio of the number of people who actually do blog about their Carbonmade experiences, but we'll definitely be naming at least two winners. Please e-mail us directly at hello[at]carbonmade.com with a link to your post! The winners will be announced on this blog with a link to their post along with their portfolio.

Just about five months ago we crossed 50,000 members, and as of earlier today Carbonmade has over 75,000 creative people who are active on our site. We also passed 1,000,000 images, which only a year ago was just inconceivable to us. While this blog post isn't as exciting as news to come, we want to take this chance to thank you all again for using Carbonmade. Please continue to e-mail us with any questions, to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed for future announcements.