Tony

This has been completed.

I can't say this for sure but most likely we'd be able to transfer you to a European server when they come available. As for right now most users in Europe prefer our Washington DC location as it's the closest. As far as image hosting no limits there besides your space. My only recommendation is make sure your forum is set to store in the file system and not the database. Storing tons of images in the database will make things slow real fast.

I would suggest opening a ticket regarding this.

Hello, IPB runs fine on our servers as support all the requirements. As far as servers in Europe not at this time but the current ETA is some time in q4 of this year we will have servers in Amsterdam. As far as payment you can pay for just hosting you do not need to register the domain with us. There is an option on the order form to just update your nameservers.

It should not be a problem resource wise pictures are not intensive. Your biggest worry would be the bandwidth all the pictures may use. Your cheapest option would probably be using CloudFlare on your site as it acts sort of like a CDN and can serve the images and thus save you bandwidth.

Scheduled Maintenance - SEA01 [03 & 04 AUG 2011] [08/03/2011] Date: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 (08/03/2011) Start Time: 07:00 AM UTC End Time: 03:00 PM UTC Services affected: Public / Private Network Location: SEA Duration: 32 hours * What Work is Being Performed: As part of our ongoing work to improve overall customer experience and reliability, Datacenter network engineers will be performing maintenance in the Seattle (SEA) facility. Because of the scope of the changes that are planned we will be splitting the work across 2 nights to ensure that the work can be done with the least impact to our customers. During the first maintenance window the morning of August 3rd from 12:01am Pacific Time (07h01 UTC) to 8:00am Pacific Time (15h00 UTC), we will be replacing the existing CER01/02 distribution routers (Cisco 7600 platform) with new DAR01/02 routers (Juniper MX platform). We will also be migrating all of our datacenter connections to a new dark fiber system that will double the capacity available between our network point-of-presence and our datacenters in Seattle. During the second maintenance window the morning of August 4th from 12:01am Pacific Time (07h01 UTC) to 8:00am Pacific Time (15h00 UTC), we will be replacing the existing BBR01/02 backbone routers (Cisco 7600 platform) with new routers (Juniper MX platform). In order to do this change with minimal impact to our customers we will be replacing the routers one at a time. This will allow us to take down one of the redundant routers and unrack it, rack the new router and configure it, and insert it inline. Once we've completed insertion of the new router we will then repeat the process for the second router. We will also be turning up the new connections between our datacenter and network point-of-presence during this time. * Why This Work is Being Performed: This new hardware will greatly enhance our capacity and reliability in this market in order to accommodate growing demand on the network. * How Will This Work Impact Your Service: Because these routers are deployed as a redundant pair we don't anticipate any measurable downtime. During the maintenance periods there will be traffic re-routing across different parts of our backbone, different ISPs etc. Due to those traffic moves, there may be changes to customer end-to-end latency for public and private traffic. Additionally, there is a remote risk of temporary packet loss or increased latency due to router switching fabric congestion during the duration of the maintenance. We will have engineers working on site to replace the equipment as well as engineers working remotely to mitigate any potential issues that arise as quickly as possible. It is anticipated that this work will consume all 8 hours of the scheduled window.

We will be in the next few days

The machine is now back online and serving requests again. The file system has been repaired and the issues experienced earlier and the everything seems optimal once again

File system check has been completed the server is now rebooting

80% complete the file system check

61% complete the file system check

25% complete the file system check so far

The machine was just taken down we hope to have it back up within an hour

The Wildcat server has been throwing file system errors since early this morning and as a result we will have no choice but to take the machine down for file system maintenance in order to correct this problem. We will be starting this at 11:30 AM PDT at the latest but we may be forced to do this earlier depending on how the system holds up. We estimate that the file system check we will be doing could take up to an hour to be completed and during this time the system will be unavailable. We have no choice but to do this maintenance as if we do not the file system corruption will continue to get worse. Date: 07/10/2011 Start time (PDT): 11:30am End time (PDT): unknown Estimated Down Time: 60 minutes

It's better now no hyperlink !

We've since been able to start routing all our name server IP's again which should help with users who's ISP's are very slow at propagating name server changes.

At this point in time everything is back up for all locations behind any networking equipment.

It was back up about 10 minutes later according to monitoring. Might see a maintenance notice over the next few weeks to replace the memory though so look out for that.

One year users already complain to us about how they should get refunds 6 months later. I could just imagine the number of 5 year users we'd have this issue with and disputes and chargebacks coming from us denying. There is also the issue of how much people pay already. So basic plan costs $39.48/yr so in five years that is $197.40. So I imagine someone would want to pay $100 for 5 years. We could not make money when we would be earning $1.67 per month on the account. Cashflow is great and all but there is a point where you're not making money on the accounts. Hawk Host is ran in such a way we're not constantly needing big amounts of cash from users. We make sure that we always have cash on hand or loans available to always acquire more hardware as necessary. So all that extra cash flow would go to waste in helping the company. All we could do with it is collect interest on it in our bank accounts but we would not make enough to justify what people would expect to pay for a 5 year account. If we were selling $120/yr accounts like some providers offering the longer term accounts could work since most of them can make money if on a 5 year payment it works out to $60/yr

Most likely previously it was never serving the caches properly. Some themes cause the caches to go stale extremely fast. The way you're describing it is exactly how it should be as comments are not critical to be instant. So it can serve the same cache file more times before clearing it out. For the comment spam the caching plugin isn't really going to solve the root of the problem. You need to install a plugin to make their spamming less effective. As far as caching plugins I'd stick to w3 total cache or wp super cache. The reason being I've found the alternatives do not do a very good job cleaning up. So if you have 1000 posts it's going to be 1000 files at a minimum even if the majority the posts are not even visited anymore. There is no point in using up space and making a huge mess for a page that only gets visited twice a day.

Normal power has been restored.

Here is further information about the outage as well as maintenance being performed right now

This has been completed.

This has been completed.

This has been completed.