The data center company decided to have a planned maintenance (6 hours long) today but failed to email our service provider so in turn we did not get notified. We experienced a downtime of about 20 minutes. The realm is back online but it is having momentary disconnects. So it appears they are indeed using the full 6 hours.

Unrelated to this, I have been planning on hunting down a beefy server for a GS in europe that we could try some new configurations on to see if we can get some high powered game servers that are reliable and without lag. If this experiment goes well, we could over time reduce the number of GS we have and change them into fewer but higher performance servers in key regions such as EU East/West and NA East/West. I've found a server in Eastern Europe that offers half off on the first month so I can get something very affordable for us to test. Note: this was made possible by discovering some undocumented d2 emulation settings which could take advantage of more powerful hardware. It is NOT guaranteed to work, but a 1 month test at 50% off seems like a reasonable amount of money to give it a try. Thanks to those who support us with donations.

So I've decided to execute my GS test so I've ordered the new server. To add it to our realm it will require the realm to be restarted. Since we are already having some disconnect issues and are waiting for the maintenance to end at the data center, I think it makes sense for me to turn off the realm and bring it back up once the maintenance has ended and I have hooked up the new game server.