Some of you might have noticed a deterioration in the performance of the game, forum and website over the past few days. Our web host has been hit several times by a massive Denial of Service attack that have affected us on the network level (i.e. it was directed against a different host, or server(s), in the same datacentre). This went on for an unnecessarily long period of time, particularly for a datacentre operation as big as the one we use. We were not happy as it wasn't the only attack; this has happened several times over the past few months. Dewi and I both come from an ISP background and we know there are ways to minimise the damage these attacks spread to innocent bystanders (like our servers) at little cost to the hosting company thus we've made a decision to move elsewhere. This isn't a spur of the moment decision, or a trivial operation, and some bits of it will be quite tricky but the alternative is a patchy, second-rate service; something we will never settle for.
For this reason we have identified a new server host we will be moving to over the next couple of weeks and will be moving all thudgame and thudguild assets there by the end of the month. Dewi and I will look at recent usage trends and try to identify a window of opportunity when we will be able to "throw the switch" when we change the DNS records to point to the new host. Most will be able to reach the new site very soon afterward but some may have Internet service providers that cache DNS records for an inordinately long period of time. If, when this happens, you can't reach the site I urge you to contact us via e-mail at support [at] thudgame dot com where we will provide you with a temporary way to access the server.
For you techies out there, the new server host appears to be (you can only believe so much that's in marketing blurbs) one that is properly multi-homed, offers a wide array of lovely webserver OSs and have provided refreshingly wonderful customer service even before we've been customers. We had despaired to ever find this combination in the Internet service industry but have, thus far, been pleasantly surprised. Drop us an e-mail if anyone wants to know more. We aren't re-sellers. Yet.
Just to reprise, we're moving house, we'll have it all done and dusted by the end of the month and we're going to work really hard to try and make it so that no one notices 
Thanks ever so much for your patience over the past few weeks/months,
Lee Alley
I'm actually looking forward to this because it allows me to test my "zero downtime server change" thing
This was one of the major reasons I went for basing the server around the IRCd protocol.
The way it works is we have both servers up, connected to eachother. People could connect to either one, and through the magic of IRC, see everyone on both servers.
The database on the new server is set to be a "slave" mirror of the db on the old.
To begin with, everyone connects to the old server. When we flick the switch so that DNS starts to the new one, people start to connect to it, and eventually, once the DNS has propagated globally, everyone goes to the new server when they connect.
Finally, we set the new copy of the database to be the primary, run a gameserver bot on the new server, which requests all clients to transparently authenticate with it and use it instead of the old bot. Nobody notices they're talking to a different game server bot, and since the database stores all the game states, they carry on from where they left off without even having to hit "restart game". Statefullness is stored on the mysql server.
There will still be people who'd connected to the old server logged in for a while after that, so we keep the server running until they all log off in their own time.
The end result is that nobody will ever notice a "flicking the switch" effect as the game moves hosts.
In practice, stuff may go wrong. So each step (changing DNS, changing slave to master database) will be done at low usage times, preferably when there's nobody at all logged on. Which kindof defeats the point and the coolness of zero-downtime, but at least I can still brag about it.
As of tonite our old server has been wiped free of info and will be going to the great datacentre in the sky. Our spanking, sparkling new server will flex its muscles and serve up some nice fare and things should continue, only better! It appears we've made the transition with only a little fanfare (sorry OB, t'was a vhosts IP address screw-up by me...
) having moved all of our websites, web apps (including online thud and the forum) AND (coz it would have been just too un-eventful and dull otherwise) all our domain names to new hosts.
We've learned that .uk domain names are a faff (naturally, unless you know the secret handshake), that LAMP rocks (why pay for Plesk or cPanel when there are cool, free things like Webmin?!?) and that finally someone decided to put the "service" into "Internet Service Provider" as we've found a reasonably good hosting datacentre with superb rates and fantastic customer service (and that was all before we were actually customers!). Check our website next week or so as we'll def blog on it.
Anyway, all should be settled down for at least a year; outages should be rarer than rocking horse doo-doo (he says, with a pensive look towards Cori Celesti...), or at least rarer, and we can concentrate on cool stuff again. We appreciate much everyone's patience and good humour thru the past two or three months and we're working hard to make things rock-solid for the foreseeable future.
Speaking of cool stuff, do tune in day after tomorrow as there will be a BIG announcement.....