The company who host our web servers in the states are moving their data centre to a new custom built building. Generally this is good news as it means faster connections to the web but it means they need to physically move all of their servers from the old building across town to the new one.
Because our sites are spread over multiple servers (to spread the load) this means that we will have 2 outages – Wed 17th & Wed 24th. Our hosting company start work at 11pm their time (4am our time) and the move can take up to 8 hours. They expect that each server will only be out for 3 hours. Therefore worst case is that we are down for the two Wednesday mornings until about midday. As the whole server will be switched off there will not be any messages telling visitors this is a planned outage.
We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope it doesn’t completely mess up your plans.
Dean
UPDATE: Due to bad weather in the States Tuesdays outage has been delayed until next week
UPDATE: 17th Feb 12:45
What a fun morning! The actual server move when ok and they had the server up and running by about 8am UK time. But we couldn't get the forums to work. After several hours of back and forth with the guys in the states we have identified the problem as communication between their new data center and Amazons S3 service. We use the S3 service to store a lot of the images that people include in their posts.
To get the forums up and running again for now we have disabled the S3 service. Dont worry the your avartars and images are not lost, just disabled. You should be able to continue to use the forums normally, just dont try and attach any photos today. I'll update you when we fix the problem (although you'll probably spot it as all the avatars will suddenly reappear) I'll also update our twitter when its fixed so you can follow us on www.twitter.com/hitchedcouk for updates.
Sorry the problems - Dean
UPDATE: 17th Feb 15:00ish
The problem has been fixed - turned out to be a network routing issue in the depths of the internet that we got caught up. Hopefully all the images are back and everything is working.