Site downtime

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up about this.  I would have made it a front page announcement as well but I didn't want to overwrite the announcement about the SFMan and I didn't want to wait until that one expired.<br /><br />The web site access will be probably be spotty for several hours starting midday on Friday, Aug 24 and may be off for as much as a day.  The hosting provider (me) will be getting a network upgrade during that time.  My ISP (which here is a city utility) is rolling out upgraded networks and I volunteered to be a beta tester.  They contacted me yesterday to set up a service appointment.  They are coming out Friday to do the upgrade (which probably means some work on the hardware on the street and maybe a new router in the house).<br /><br />For most of you, this will just be a downtime that you may not even notice if you're not constantly on the site like I am.  Beyond that you should not notice much change.  However, after the upgrade you will hopefully notice better download speeds for larger files as my upstream bandwidth will more than triple.  (The page load speeds aren't realy impacted by this as they are limited by the complex queries that go on in the database in the background.  That will only speed up if someone buys me a faster server <img src="http://www.starfrontiers.us/modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/p…; alt="Wink" title="Wink" border="0" /> as the queries max out the CPU).<br /><br />For those who want the technical details:<br />I'm moving from the base tier to the middle tier service which means my bandwidth is going from 12Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up to 20Mbps down/5Mbps up.  That was only a $10/month increase in cost.  They have a 50Mbps down/10Mbps up option as well but that would have more than doubled my monthly cost so I decided not to do that one.  (If someone wants to send me $40 a month I'll upgrade to the higher speed <img src="http://www.starfrontiers.us/modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/p…; alt="Smile" title="Smile" border="0" />).<br /><br />@w00t:  This will probably mean my IP address will change for the first time in nearly 2 years.  I'll let you know if it does via e-mail.  If it does change, you'll need to update the DNS entry for the site since I don't have access to do so.  You should probably remind yourself how to change it just to be ready to minimize downtime.  I just reviewed my DNS provider's site to remind myself for all my sites.<br /><br />I'll proabably be doing some physical (cleaning out dust, re-applying thermal paste between the heat sink an CPU, etc) and virtual cleaning and updating (new kernel version) of the server hardware and software at the same time but that should happen while it's off line and shouldn't add any extra down time.