Downtime coming tomorrow morning.

Just to warn folks, the Arcen forums will have about 1-2 hours of downtime (at worst -- could be as little as 20 minutes) tomorrow morning, June 28th.  Somewhere between 8am and 12 pm EST, but I'm not sure the exact window there.  The community wiki  will also be down during that time, but the rest of the Arcen site, including the store and the official wiki, won't experience any downtime at all.

We're switching hosts away from lunarpages shared hosting to the rackspace cloud sites.  It's amazing we've lasted so long on a shared server, to be honest -- we're routinely averaging 8000 to 12000 hits per day now even when there's not much going on, and significantly more when there's big news or events.  We switched our large file handling over to the Amazon S3 cloud about half a year ago, and that really staved off the inevitable of us needing a more robust hosting service for the site itself, but now we're hit the point where things are slowing down a bit, and with the release of Tidalis being pretty close at hand we had fears of the site slowing to a crawl or getting so overburdened there would be outages.

At any rate, with the new hosting service it should be a lot zippier of service, especially under heavy load conditions.  After the brief window of downtime tomorrow, there will also be 24-48 hours where the Arcen forums and similar are running on a different url other than arcengames.com (while the DNS transfers), so don't be alarmed when you see that.  It will be back to being arcengames.com for everyone by mid-week.

Should be a good improvement!  And we're also going to make use of these new servers to enable our own master server game listings for Tidalis, and later AI War as well (while we wait for Impulse Reactor V2).