As you will have noticed (else you could not be reading this!) the messageboard is back up and running.
Before anyone goes on a rant about how long it took, can I first apologise and say that due to an unfortunate series of events we were prevented from continuing the upgrade/upload to the live site due to technical problems with the OLD hosting site. This has now been resolved and the board is now upgraded and back up.
Please see the text below for more info as written on the 12th December 2016:
The Morris Minor Owners Club have been experiencing some technical issues over the last week with the hosting of certain websites and services. Historically all MMOC websites have been hosted on a dedicated server provisioned through 1&1 Internet Ltd. This included the mmoc.org.uk phpbb message board and related databases.
During the weekend of the 3rd / 4th December, the server experienced a major corruption to the hard drive array resulting in the total loss of the server, all sites and the databases running them. The new mmoc.org.uk website and membership back office system runs on a completely separate system and has not been affected by this outage.
The outage was raised through the appropriate support channels at 1&1 and by the afternoon of Wednesday 7th December, 1&1 had been able to rebuild the server and restore all the website content folders which restored service to all branch websites.
However, the databases which run the mmoc.org.uk message board forum and http://www.morriscentenary.org.uk website remained offline. our IT provider Ltd who have provided our new website have been chasing 1&1 daily, including over the weekend, but it is with the 3rd line technical team at 1&1 and so far, we have been unable to get any further progress reports.
This issue has been escalated to the technical support management at 1&1 and a formal complaint is being raised as well in an effort to speed up the recovery of the databases.
As soon as the databases are restored, our IT provider will be able to finish the migration of the message board to the new site.
The team at MMOC head office and our IT provider are doing all they can to get this issue resolved as soon as possible and ask for your patience during this unusually long outage. Unfortunately, our hands are tied until the technical support team at 1&1 Internet can resolve the database issues. It is a managed service provided by 1&1 so at present there are no other options other than to keep chasing until we get a resolution from them.
We would like to reiterate that this issue is not related to the recent update to the new http://www.mmoc.org.uk website nor is it due to anything that the MMOC or our IT provider have done or not done.