Planned Maintenance: HSphere Hosting Services
Patches for OS and Replacement of Hardware
When is this maintenance:
Starting Thursday 3rd December 2015 18:00
Completing Monday 7th December 2015 06:00
What is being done:
* Upgrade to latest versions of Operating Systems where supported
* 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, Email Hosting on legacy H-Sphere Clusters
Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers, Colocated Servers etc are not affected
Each server will need to be taken offline for a short period during the maintenance to execute a physical to virtual conversion of the operating system for deployment onto new servers with more ram and faster (SSD) drives.
Due to the cluster nature of hsphere, whilst each individual server outage is expected to be around 2 hours, they are interdependant, and so mail/web/etc will not work while the control panel or sql servers are updated – any shutdown/restart/reboot/virtualisation events needing to be done are 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
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.
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. The constant attacks of all internet-connected machines means an ongoing security update is needed, and pre-emptive server replacement prevents overall downtime due to failed components
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.
