Planned Maintenance: Shared Hosting Services
Patches for OS / Control Panels and Upgrades to Hardware
What is being done:
* Upgrade to latest versions of Operating Systems, Control Panels, Script Installers and System Addons
* Additional RAM to motherboard maximum supported levels for all shared-hosting services
* Standardisation of hosting server specifications across all platforms to 8 CPU Cores | 32GB Ram | SSD Disks
Who is affected:
All Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Media Hosting, ShoutCAST Hosting, File Hosting, Email Hosting, WordPress Hosting and Ecommerce Hosting services on shared servers running:
- cPanel/WHM
- DirectAdmin
- DotNet/Website Panel
- Legacy Ensim
- Legacy Ensim Windows
- Legacy Plesk/Parallels/Odin
- Legacy HSphere
Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers, Colocated Servers etc are not affected. If you have a Management Service for your server with Astutium, you will be contacted directly regarding a timeslot for your system to be updated and restarted.
Each server will need to be taken offline for a short period during the maintenance to physically add additional RAM (where supported) and then to be restarted with the latest security patches to operating system, control panel and related items.
Whilst the individual server outage is expected to be around 1 hour, they will be done in stages over the maintenance period, with any shutdown/restart/reboot events done planned for between 8pm and 8am
During the maintenance window you will temporarily not be able to access aspects of your hosting accounts through the Client Portal, via Control Panel or by http/ftp/pop3/smtp/imap etc
We are unable to provide an exact time for you as it will depend on the type of services you use, the amount of work needed to be completed on each machine, and the specification of each server (average boot-time of a shared hosting server from ‘off’ is 18 minutes for it to count+test the memory and other devices, load the operating system and start serving clients)
The basic procedure will be:
* Stop all services and shutdown machine – 10 minutes
* Pull from rack and put on workbench – 10 minutes
* Upgrade hardware and test – 20 minutes
* Apply patches and updates – 10 minutes
* Return to rack and power on – 10 minutes
* Check all services started ok – 20 minutes
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 unavailable until the server has completely restarted following the upgrades and patches.
FTP upload/download access will return once we have confirmed all data is available.
Streaming services will automatically resume to their previous state as soon as the maintenance on the specific machine has completed.
When is this maintenance:
Starting Thursday 26 November 2015 18:00
Completing Monday 30 November 2015 06:00
*EDIT* work was postponed 1 week from original dates published due to late delivery of parts
Why do we need to do this:
It is important for the safety and security of your data that each of the server(s) providing your hosting has the most current security updates, operating system patches and control panel improvements. A number of our control panel providers have released major new versions in recent weeks following security audits, and those changes need to urgently be applied to protect your websites.
Additionally by bringing all the shared hosting servers up-to the same level of specification (following our recent switch to ALL-SSD based hosting for performance improvements) it makes keeping spares more manageable, as well as reducing “fix-times” should there be any hardware failures.
