Starting on March 26th, we will be shipping the two servers that this site currently runs on from San Fransisco to Pennsylvania as we are switching hosting centers. The main site will be temporarily hosted on the old front end server in San Fransisco while the other two are in transit and being set back up. The forums will be either hosted on our static file server in the Netherlands or on another server run off a high capacity cable connection. We haven’t decided which yet.

But anyway, during this week or so of moving and setting up, we may have downtime from time to time, but we will do our best to ensure that the site and forums are as normal as possible.

Thanks for using FinalGear.com. :)

Sorry about the downtime we had earlier today.. we had some unexplained power issues from the datacenter.

EDIT @ 12:11: Update / explanation on the forums for those who care. Torrent downloads have also been fixed. -Viper

Do you live within driving distance of the ‘Ring (that’d be Germany for those who are seriously clueless)? If so, check out this thread on our forums. We’re trying to get a meet going for sometime in May and need input from those who’d be interested in showing up. So speak up!

You’re now looking at the site and forums on the new webserver. The OS change on the database server hasn’t taken place yet, so for the moment the database is on this server as well, but at some point it will be moved back onto it’s sister server so that we can handle the increased load when Top Gear returns.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with us during the downtime and while we finish up the move.

A kickass and really powerful new webserver will be installed on the 26th and the database server will also be taken down for some work then, so don’t be worried when we go down for a couple hours sometime on the 26th.

EDIT: Sorry to everyone for the lack of downtime that day, we had a few issues with the server preventing us from installing it. We are in the process of reloading and configuring the system, so it is on target to be installed tomorrow, the 30th. ~Quiky

12/15 00:53: We’ve switched to using a different server for hosting the images. All should be well now. ;)

The server we currently are using to serve all of the images located on the site and forums (they are hosted on a separate, high-bandwidth server) is currently overloaded with connections. This is resulting in some broken images.

We are aware of the issue and are currently working on resolving the problem. Please stick with us and thanks for your patience.

Emergency Outage Notification:

ESTIMATED START TIME: 11/03/2006 21:00 PST
ESTIMATED END TIME: 11/04/2006 01:00:00 PST
SERVICES AFFECTED: All
PURPOSE OF WORK: Emergency power repair.
IMPACT OF WORK: All network services will be unavailable during the repair work.

Our colo provider, 365 Main, alerted us yesterday that they need to perform emergency work on their power system tonight. All of our equipment is on redundant power feeds to two separate Power Distribution Units, but unfortunately 365 will be bringing down both PDUs that we are connected to. We are taking measures to minimize the effect of this outage.

We just learned of this, so don’t be worried during those 2 4 hours or so of downtime. PST is GMT-8 if you didn’t know, so that makes the downtime start in about 7 hours from the time of this post.

–UPDATE–

Site/Forums are back up. Enjoy.

Bah, I kept for getting to post this earlier. This last Wednesday, we switched our forums over to the awesome forum software vBulletin. It has a ton more features and we all really love it. We’re still on the default theme as the new theme isn’t quite ready yet, but that’s okay as the default one isn’t that bad.

So, if it’s been a while (or even if you’ve never been!) since you last visited our forums, I personally invite you to drop by. They’re full of Top Gear and Fifth Gear resources (such as the name of pretty much every song out of every episode of both shows) as well as some great off-topic discussion. So what are you waiting for? Come on in!