Server move
I had just placed an order with Jaguar PC for a dedicated server when I noticed that chat.fabswingers.com had gone down. Eventually after an email exchange with support it turns out that the reason the server was failing was because Jaguar PC had allocated my IP number to another customer; and because I was less important than the other customer it would have to be me who would change my IP address. This will probably result in about two days of outage. There was no explanation or offer of compensation.
If this was an isolated incident I would still be very angry but it follows two lengthy outages caused by their inability to enable journalling on large file systems (which means that you can be down for days while the systems check themselves for errors - more than 48 hours in one incident).
Anyway, I spent a lot of time looking around and eventually decided to do some whois’s on the IP addresses of some of my competitors, I chose competitors who seem to have reliable websites. I also did a bit of Googling. In the end I’ve chosen ServePath, I didn’t really like the prices on offer but if you hang in there then the prices come down and the spec goes up to something much better!
I’m getting a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 1024 MB RAM, 80 GB drive and 1500 GB data transfer on Debian. This should be enough to take Fab Swingers to 300,000 members, if it scales as I expect.