Planned Maintenance: cPanel04 Hosting Server
Replacement Drives, Migration of Data and Hardware Upgrades
What is being done:
Replacement of SSD Hard Drives and Migration of all existing data to the new disks, following the check/repair/analysis of other hosting servers (see Emergency Maintenance – CPanel06 on 16/November) we are continuing the rollout of new SSD drive arrays for shared-hosting, reseller hosting, secure hosting and email hosting services
Who is affected:
Clients with cPanel/WHM Linux Hosting Services (web, email, personal, business hosting packages) on server:
- cPanel04
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The server will need to be completely offline during the maintenance to physically swap hard-drives, and restore all data as quickly as possible.
During the maintenance window you will not be able to access any aspect of your hosting accounts through the Client Portal, via WHM/cPanel or by http/ftp/pop3/smtp/imap etc
The servers will need to be powered down, have all drives removed, duplicated and replaced, and other hardware changed before bringing up with limited access whilst services are started in a controlled manner and the reported disk-io and load investigations are completed.
This will involve a maximum of 8 hours of outage of all services (mail, web, databases etc) on server cp04 and some limited access for an additional 24 hours whilst the impact and improvements are monitored and tweaked.
We are unable to provide an exact time for you to regain any access to your hosting account as it will depend on the type of services you use – email only will be back first, followed by ftp, web, databases – if any ‘prioritisation’ of clients is necessary, then those with the advanced-support levels will be 1st, followed by Enterprise & E-Commerce clients, then Business, Personal and finally any trial and subsidised/discounted/internal services.
Incoming email during this time will ‘queue’ at the sender, Outbound emails will stay on your local machine (where using a mail client) – webmail access will be unavailable until the work is completed.
Websites will be down until the data has been restored, Websites which rely on a database will start to work once the mysql databases are restored and repaired.
FTP upload/download access will return once we have confirmed all data is available.
Access to other services/ports where supported will then be made available again.
When is this maintenance:
Starting Sunday 15 March 2015 18:00
Completing Tuesday 17 March 2015 06:00
This is the resheduled maintenance from 19th Dec 2014 which was postponed due to hardware incompatibility
Why do we need to do this:
Several hosting servers have reported disk-corruptions over recent months, which required previous maintenance and downtime to repair on some. On completing a full scan of all drive arrays on all servers, datacentre technicians decided that a full replacement would be necessary at some point in the future for each machine (around a 1 year anniversary from last upgrade). In order to minimise any potential loss of client data, we have decided to do that in a controlled manner as soon as possible.
We are therefore going to be migrating to new drives to increase the IO capabilities, add more ram to upgrade caching for overall performance benefits, and some reconfiguration – so that the server(s) can be returned to service at full capacity and eliminate the ‘pending fail’ possibility of the drive array.
updates
2015-03-16 19:00 – All data restored to new drives and hardware swapped over
2015-03-16 19:30 – All Email Services returned to service – imap/pop3/smtp – exc. webmail
2015-03-16 19:45 – All static websites returned to service
2015-03-16 20:00 – Webmail returned to service
2015-03-16 20:15 – All MySQL DB services returned to service after full mysqlcheck
Maintenance is completed – if you are currently seeing any issues with your service on hosting server cpanel08 please open a ticket through the client portal
