Forum URL: http://insanity.vforums.co.uk and support.vforums.co.uk
Experienced By: Me and Jon
Browser: Me FireFox 3.0.5 Jon Safari
Operating System: Me Windows XP | Jon Mac

Problem: vForums is loading really slowly today. :[. I knew I shouldn't have given coffee to the server hamster. :[

Personally I'm having no issues loading any VF pages. Are you and Jon living in the same general area and/or use the same ISP?

Jon lives in New Zealand, I am in California. It was about an hour straight before I posted that message Mark. We both got time out erros as well.

The servers we are using are currently in two geographical locations. All main forums are hosted in a data centre in the UK whereas mail services and parts of the website are hosted in the US. One of the parts hosted in the US is the server status page.

http://status.virtualforums.co.uk

Which takes a snap shot of the status every 3 minutes. It then handles secondary notifications if it detects that a server is down (primary notification is handled by a script on each server).

All I can say is that the server itself didn't report any problems to me so could not have been off-line at any point. The server status page did report a blip about an hour before your message was posted. When this has occurred before I've found that there is nothing wrong with either server but it is down to a connection problem somewhere along the route (the route between you and the server).

If you encounter it again I would suggest attempting to do a tracert of the route to the server (which may show how far it is getting before being unable to connect to the server). It's also a good idea to keep an eye on the server status page to see how busy the server is and if the status server is able to connect to it or not.