Server Move - Version 6,000,000!
 

Dear all

Please accept our sincere apologies for the huge outage over the last couple of days.

We are still working hard on the move, but will report back soon with a full update and explanation. We wanted to get back up and running for you as soon as possible, but some features may not be working properly as yet.

Please bear with us and we'll get it all sorted.

Thanks for your patience

webby

Well done :)

You sanctimonious so and so!:D

Well done :cool::thumb:

Tony

I expect you've been real busy and later may wish to edit some of the "links" to General or other forums as the till have .co.uk rather than .com ;)

phew was nearly having to join sidc
martin

It's outrageous etc ;) I don't pay no money to expect a service like this :D

Panic over. I was even thinking of leaving the house!!:lol1: :lol1:

i DID leave the house. i never realised you can drive your subaru aswell as look at it. thankyou sn for opening my eyes.

Thanks Webby and the team :thumb:

Allan

Holy website outtage, Batman :eek: ;)

Glad you guys got it sorted, good work fellas :)

It just wasnt the same with out the web site up... christ I submitted a request to join the sidc... :cuckoo:

I want a refund for lost advertising.........just kidding :D

That reminds me, I need to pay you!

Excellent.

Well done guys :notworthy

I thought i was going to have to watch Love Island tonight if there was still no scoobynet.

Still, atleast the wife has had the use of the laptop for a couple of nights.

Nik.

Well done.

:) :) :) :)

Keep up the good work.

Got my stickers'n'sh1t on Tuesday, no SN Wednesday

Damn those boys run a tight ship:norty:

are the servers at telehouse city?

If the probs were power related, then apologies, I installed the generators :D

I nearly had to start talking to the G/F :eek: :eek: :eek:

Lucky you've returned :thumb: :D

Thank to scoobynet, my cousin banned me from his forum :mad:

It was crap anyway :D

My boss says 'Thanks for the outage' :D

Does that mean it was all your fault!!

LOL:lol1:

At least you know where to send the bill ;) :D

Apologies for the delay.. as promised, here is some information.

Our long term hosts (who we will not name, and ask you all to respect this as well please) have proven to be considerably unreliable of late.

Since a few changes to their internal staffing structure and management a few years ago, we have experienced a dramatic downturn in customer service, technical reliability and site speed.

We were finding that requests for straight forward changes were not being completed, people didn't call us back, etc.

Finally the straw that broke the camels back happened early this week when the site speed drew to an almost impossibly slow rate.

[techy boring bit]
We were (At the time) running 3 servers. 1 windows 2000 server which was serving small web elements with low traffic such as dyno.scoobynet, etc to keep the asp stuff as seperate as possible from the forum. 1 decent spec windows 2003 server which was running the databases and a few back end functions, and finally 1 fairly high spec linux webserver dedicated to the forums.

The db server was running perfectly, the other windows server was running perfectly, the linux server kept using all of its resources and people were not being served their pages. This turned out to be a routing problem between the linux server and the database server.

Unfortunately, we have no way of being able to access or affect this as it was all at our hosts control.
[/techy boring bit]

They took 24 hours to start investigating this, and then it continued to be a shambles, ending in them saying they've checked everything and it all looks fine. Enough was enough.

We decided to finally move hosts after 8 or so years (to be clear, they were FANTASTIC for the first 5 years or so). It was a very difficult decision, but it just had to be done.

The reason we did not want to mention this before was that we wanted to make sure we had all of the data off the old servers and onto the new ones prior to publicly announcing that we were moving, and then needed to work fast to get as much set up as possible prior to fully explaining.

The new set-up is (so far) proving to be a night and day improvement, but most of all, the customer support we have received and the speed at which the new hosts have reacted has been truly remarkable. I honestly can't believe it.

We'll see how this goes, and will make a full announcement about this once we're up and running properly. Again, please respect this if you know already!

-

Anyway.. Things look extremely positive now and I expect the service to be astranomically better from now on.

Why haven't we done this before? Simple loyalty to our hosts and trusting that they would get all these customer service issues sorted out sooner or later. They had helped us out in the past when things were really difficult, and I believe it is important to recognise this kind of thing. But after 3 years of desperate problems and no discernable improvement, we had no choice but to finally pull the plug.

We sincerely apologise to the entire community for this unreliability. It has been killing us to have to put up with it, as we have been unwilling to just drag their name through the mud and explain all of these problems in detail as I just don't think it would have been fair.

Thanks for your patience. I truly believe this is the start of a far better service.

All the best

Simon (your old mate! :D), Shaun and ScoobyNet.

Well, I said I'd eat humble pie, and I shall publically say "thank you" to both Simon and Shaun for posting the information regarding the outage.

is 'humble pie' cannuck terminology for arse? ;)

Well done Markus (being genuine btw).

Please just understand in future that we have reasons for not sharing information if we do decide to. This has been the case for the last 3 years when it has come to technical issues, for the reasons stated above.

As I'm sure you (only now) understand, your continued demands for technical information and attacking us for not giving it to you have been completely unjustified and unfair.

We have also tried to explain to you and other who have continually told us about how we could have such a better and more robust set-up if we just did x, y, z.. yet we have tried to explain that there is far more to it than you realise. I hope you now understand what the "far more to it" was and will respect this the next time we say it.

Anyway.. Apology accepted.

Simon

TBH, the speed/ slow reponse issues I have noticed with your last hosts has been inline with certain issue I have had with other sites using the same company.

And I must admit, I spent some of my spare time trying to work out why I was getting such a slow server response from certain sites on my home pc. And blamed my ISP, which admittedly isn't firing on all cylinders at the moment, until I noticed a a small coincidance...the sites I was having difficulty with use the same host. Funny that. ;)

And just to add, this place is as fast as its been for a long time. Barring a few DNS and caching issues which are my end, not yours (understandably)

Just like to add a Thank You to the team in the back room to getting this all sorted.

I use the Snet a lot for info/sales/wanted and sometimes general interest, and had a lot going on just when it crashed....but all seems well and I'm sure we will all benefit from the hard work!

911

Well done ;)