An Actual Scheduled Downtime

I was just contacted by HostGator; they're willing to look into my problem further.

The forum will be turned off anytime in the very near future, and I hope to have it back up soon. This will facilitate the move back to HostGator.

Update: move complete.

RAF's Main Host Down... (updated)

RAF's main host has been down from 12pm today January 2, 2009. One hour later I decided to flip the switch so to speak on the host we recently acquired.

I am feverishly working to bring the website up-to-date.

Update 5pm: Updating complete. Attachments which were uploaded after the 27th of December will not work. In addition, attaching files, and uploading avatars have been disabled.

Update 8am January 3: XEHost is back up. I'm in the process of bringing back all the avatars and attachments that were uploaded after the 27th.

Update 840am: Old attachments are now back. Will be moving back to the old host; nothing will change, and no downtime will be experienced. Attachments and avatar uploading will be re-enabled.

Doing a database host switch...

That's why the Forum is down. It should be back up in no time.

Move only took 10 minutes.

The connection problems should be reduced now.

RAF is Offline

Unfortunately. But the RAF Chat is still open.

Update 1: The website is back up, but unfortunately the SQL server is down. This means access to the forum is still impossible.

Update 2: RAF Forum is back online.

Entire website went offline today

That's right. From about 4:30pm EST, 'till 7:30pm EST RAF in its entirety went offline. This was caused by "temporary routing issues", and according to XEHost's support manager "it happens randomly occasionally and is unpreventable". Yet I have never had the entire website shut down.

So, being the person I am, redundancy is key. Now that I know of this issue which can affect anything under our domain animorphsforum.com (which is what happened today), I am asking everyone to bookmark, or simply remember rafforum.com our quick domain to the RAF Forum.

If this were ever to happen again, just try to access us via rafforum.com, and most likely it will redirect you to the RAF Chat.

RAF Forum is down.

11:29pm est: We're back up!

10:20pm est: The forum itself is down.

The website is experiencing speed problems, but is still online. The Blog & Chat are unaffected.

RAF Chat is Down

Not sure what is happening, but right now the RAF Chat is down. When I

get home, I will look into this further.

Edit: Things seem to be back up.

BRB & We're Back!

The forum will BRB.

Edit: 12:23EST

Restart your computer or browser to access the forum.

Bigger Host & Future Downtime

I've found ourselves a new host. Well, incidentally, it was our first paid home (XEHost) back in 2007. They currently host the Blog. So we are simply moving back with a bigger share of their server. Our current host (LiquidNet) while was munificent on the hard-drive space and bandwidth fronts, lacked in what we need the most; MySQL space (or simply Forum space). At our current rate, we would use up all available space by October of this year.

Preempting that inevitable, and rapid use of all available forum resources, I began looking for a new home. XEHost was generous enough to provide us with relatively cheap hosting with enough MySQL disk-space to last us for over 1,000 months. (Of course, their plan expires anually, so keep donating).

The actual move will take place sometime in the near future & will likely result in some downtime. But I'm trying to devise ways to keep downtime at a minimum. I will post again when I have everything in order and am ready to move.

On some other, but related news: Our main domain; animorphsforum.com is now secured until 2011.

Edit: Move Complete with only a few minutes of Forum downtime.

Internal Server Errors

10:30AM EST: RAFians, I have contacted our host again, (30 minutes ago) asking what's up with the internal server errors. I'll post back when I have more information.

11:40AM EST: I received a reply from a supervisor:

As I'm sure you have noticed we have been having quite some problems with this server which are finally to end. Our administrators had to change few Web server options as well as to recompile the Web server itself which caused this error to appear. Please note that this can happen few more times today.

11:45AM EST: A announcment was issued:

To the attention of all customers. With regard to the laboured performance your server has been showing lately due to overload and other difficulties, we are glad to inform you that final resolution the problem has been found and your websites will be working flawlessly again after we take the necessary measures.

The procedure will consist of addition of new Hard Disk Drives to the server and re-organization of the customers' web hosting accounts, so as to better consume the server resources from this time ahead.

The maintenance will be carried out in the next two days. Several very short downtimes might be experienced during the hard disk addition, however we would like to reassure you that those will be worth your patience bearing in mind the final positive result.

Thank you very much for your understanding in this matter. We firmly hope that after this maintenance procedure the server will no longer experience problems of that kind.

RAF's Continued Problems

Not to worry, our host is still experiencing problems at this time. The below screenshot details that there is something wrong. But rest assured, it's just our host acting up again. "Technical Problems" They call it.