Tomorrow we will be transitioning the entire site to a completely new rack of equipment at our new hosting provider. This process will begin at 9 AM GMT (31st May 2008) and will mean some disruption, primarily in the form of forums downtime (which may be up two hours). Once the switchover is complete it will take some time for the DNS changes to fully propogate and so you may for a short time be redirect to the new servers by URLs with the word 'new' in them, once all downstream DNS caches pick up the changes these URLs will begin to clear. Any issues with the site after the end of the switchover (about 12 PM GMT) should be reported using the Feedback page.

Updates:

  • 9:00 AM GMT: Forums temporarily closed
  • 9:08 AM GMT: Database backed up and transferred to new servers
  • 9:59 AM GMT: Database restored, maintenance and upgrading begins
  • 11:00 AM GMT: Database maintenance and upgrading taking longer than expected, ETA for forums now 12:00 PM GMT
  • 13:30 PM GMT: Database finally live, switching DNS and creating server redirections
  • 13:35 PM GMT: Site fully live on new servers