We are experiencing technical difficulties

[Thierry Martin]

The servers we use to run the forum are connected to the internet through a data center in Phoenix that is having problems. It should be fixed within an hour, several thousand sites were affected, it started earlier today, sorry it is like glue.

[Thierry Martin]

It's 24 hours later and they are still working on the problem. The site (and tens of thousands of others by the way) goes offline, then comes back at 10% normal speed. Sorry, if it makes you feel any better, we are the ones losing money when this happens.

[Thierry Martin]

The data center we use in Phoenix start going down last week, and the situation became so bad by Friday, when we were completely offline for several hours, that the decision was made to physically move the servers there to a new data center, 5 miles away. So at one point, the site will go offline again, for a couple of hours, while the server is transported to the new building, which has three connections to the backbone, instead of one. This way, when there is congestion like is happening now, we will have a backup upstream provider to kick in and we won't experience slowdowns.

There are 4,000 dedicated servers, with probably 100,000 sites, affected by this, so please don't blame us, nobody wants this. Money is being lost. Our servers are dedicated servers and are state-of-the-art, but that doesn't help if the data center keeps losing packets because they can't keep up with the demand for the whole network we are on. The move to the new data center was supposed to happen in the middle of December, but it looks like the estimate for reaching capacity in the current location was off by a couple of weeks.

The good news in all of this is that our throughput will be faster, as well as more reliable, as we will have more redundancy.

[Thierry Martin]

Our servers are being moved to a new, faster, state-of-the-art data center tonight, between 10pm and 6am Eastern Time (9pm through 5am Central Time; 8pm through 4am Mountain Time; 7pm through 3am Pacific Time) - there will be intermittent downtimes, as well as a period of 90 minutes with no service at all as the server is being physically moved 5 miles to the new location.

Sorry about this - but it is being done so we can offer better and faster service with more redundancy starting tomorrow.