This is Nate from the Internet Brands tech team.

First of all, I apologize for the recent outages on the forums. I personally have always been supportive of addicts, and as a matter of principle I believe that it's important to continue supplying addicts with opportunities to engage in the behavior mandated by their addictions. Unfortunately, sometimes there are interruptions, and these are unpleasant for all of us.

The reason for the recent BikeForums outages seems to be related to either recurring hardware failures or to a misbehaving operating system. Either way, the solution is going to be to migrate the site to completely new servers. We've ordered new machines for the site, which will be installed at the data center that hosts the majority of our Internet Brands sites, including CarsDirect.com, Autos.com, WikiTravel.org, etc. In addition to solving our outage issues, these servers should represent a performance upgrade for the site. Migrating the site will also make it easier for us to do performance tuning on the MySQL database, which should make the site quicker and more responsive as well.

The downside here is that this process is probably going to take about a month, which means that there will be occasional outages until we've been able to get set up shop on the new servers. We're going to be as vigilant as possible (with the help of the team at AdminGeekZ, who are currently helping us with server admin) about tackling these outages as soon as we're aware of them.

We hope that you'll continue to be patient as we iron out these issues. You all are a great community, and we're committed to doing everything we can to keep BikeForums running as smoothly as possible.

Thanks,

Nate