Just to let everyone in advance know that there will be some serious downtime next week.

After 10 happy years with the same internet provider, they have announced they are closing and I've no choice but to turn to another provider.

The good news is that the new provider offers a 5x increase in speed and is a much more well-established network.

The bad news is that the site will have to go offline, maybe several times. Here's the planning...

Monday 29th January: Glass fibre will be changed to a new provider. There is no time given but it will happen within a 24 hour period. If all goes well I will be able to set it up myself when it changes and get back online asap.

Tuesday 30th January 11am: Engineer will attend to set up the equipment. Or, if I've managed to do it myself, to just confirm the install has been successful.

Wednesday-Thursday: It MAY take a couple of days for your own internet provider to "know" the new address for our servers. Even though I will update the (DNS) address on Monday, some providers are sloppy and lazy and will wait maybe 3 days to update their side. Sadly this bit is out of my control.

Expected downtime:

Minimum: 1 hour, if we're lucky.
Probably: 24 hours
Maximum: 3 days (but this will be the fault of your own ISP. Just keep hitting the refresh button)

Further to this.... we will lose our 10 year reputation with the email giants like Hotmail and Gmail. They will see BM email coming from a new IP address and get suspicious. I'll do everything I can to prevent this, but can't do much sadly. It could be that emails don't get received if they treat us more harshly. There's no way I can get them to carry the old reputation over, so we gotta start from the ground up and "prove" that BM isn't a spammy website.

You can help! Mark our emails as "Safe" and maybe add our email address to your address book. This tells Hotmail, Gmail etc that you DO want our mail and makes them trust us more.

Thanks for your cooperation and understanding. I will of course keep everyone updated here.

And don't forget to put a shilling in the meter....                                                                                                                                                                             

Awwwww I'm gonna miss my wee BM, lets hope its not offline too long xx                                                                                                                                                                             

Received the new hardware and can confirm that the minimum downtime of 1 hour wont be possible. The glass fibre cable needs to be broken out of one box and installed into another.

So, on Monday the network will go down. Nobody knows what time, but within a 24 hour period.
Tuesday morning an engineer will come to move the glass fibre into the new hardware.

By Tuesday lunchtime I expect the site to be back online. From then on it's just a matter of waiting for your service provider to update their records.

My membership is up for renewal soon, think I'll wait til the site is back to normal before I do. 😀
                                                                                                                                                                             

UPDATE.... Sometime this afternoon there will be a short outage! Of about 30 minutes. This will hopefully help prepare for next week's downtime, keeping it to a minimum. Fingers crossed.
The end result will be a 5x speed increase in the BM site/network

That's a 5x increase at source, I guess?

The UK network is still struggling to get up to 25mb/s for those that can get broadband.

We do copper here, Guv...fibre to the exchange is a 'pipe dream' for most.

In fact, around 95% of the country are lucky to get more than 30 mb/s...on average.
Over 5% don't get anything at all, beyond dial up. Unless they go to satellite :)

We may have helped invent it, but we sold the idea to someone else.

Nick, It's FTTH and 500/500 mbps synchronous. 1gbps in total. Boom.

Bad news though.... Engineer today said he couldn't do his work because the box we have is 10 years old. So the glass fibre owner company has to come and change the end terminating unit first. Will hopefully be done on Monday

As midnight approaches I'm getting more and more nervous. Quite some work needs to be done to replace the glass fibre and I hope everything goes smoothly.

Please follow this Facebook post for updates while the site is offline....
https://www.facebook.com/BikerMatchCoUk/posts/10159849609510332

Matt that link leads me to faceache and it asks me to sign in, I am already signed in so I assume stupid faceache refer to an account I had some years ago, and have asked several times to be deleted.
In short means I can't view the updates.

You say to hit the refresh button where is that on my mobile phone?

We're off round the darkside of the moon... :-)                                                                                                                                                                             

I will have to get updates via friends as I'm not on farcebook. Every day seems to drag folk further into its mysterious world, which I refuse steadfastly to be lured in to.                                                                                                                                                                             

Good luck with it all Matt, see youse all on t'other side :) x                                                                                                                                                                             

1 hour to go (till midnight my time, as I'm in Holland). They suggested it could go off at midnight, so you might only have 1 hour left of BM time until we disappear into cyberspace.

Nerves are really kicking in now. Been planning this change for a week and there's a lot of variables which could cause it all to go wrong

Aargh! I don't do Facebook. Is there another way I can keep up tp date or do I just sit in the corner of a dark room and emerge two days later in the vain hope.....?😂                                                                                                                                                                             

Sorry NotPhil, once the site is offline there's no way for me to communicate with everyone. Facebook is the only option.

cat, once the site goes down that red bar will be gone - with the rest of the site lol
                                                                                                                                                                             

Thanks Matt. Good luck with the changeover and thanks for your (and the team?) efforts in giving us such a great site. I've only been using it for a few weeks but already really enjoy it and have found lots of events this year that I would never have heard about. Still trying to understand the acronyms used on the chatroom though (thank you Google)!. ROFLAGCIDH!!

You're welcome. :-D                                                                                                                                                                             

Yes thankyou for all you do anyway as the site owner, hey we will be ok ffs stop panicking folk lol ☺ xxx                                                                                                                                                                             

Well, I'm still here.