Jun 18

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance – HSphere/Win6

Emergency Maintenance: Win6
What: Software/Failure
Affects: HSphere Web Hosting Services Provided By Win6
When: Wednesday 18th June 2014 10:00 – ongoing

Unfortunately thorugh several security issues, both with HSphere itself and customer applications, web hosting services provided by this server cannot be immediately recovered.  As such we are accelerating our plans to migrate customers to more appropriate platforms as soon as possible.  HSphere is no longer appropriately supported by its authors and we have been continuing to support it for as long as we have been able to.

This process will unfortunately involve some downtime for the affected accounts.

May 23

Notification: Domain Transfer Emails to SBH Registrants

If you have today (23/May/2014) received unexpected emails about Domain Name Transfers being in progress, please accept my apologies for any concern/worry caused.

An internal tidy-up process of putting all the domains from recent Mergers & Acquisitions onto our automated systems and to allow us to reduce your price for domain renewals has triggered these emails, which can all be safely ignored.

Some of your domain(s) in the Astutium Client Portal will temporarily show as ‘Pending Transfer’ and then change back a few minutes later to ‘Active’ once the processes complete.

As soon as that happens then changes to your domain (nameservers, renewals etc) will all be fully automated, near-instant (not all registries are real-time) and processed while-you-wait online giving you an improved service level.

If you have any specific questions, please open a support ticket through the client portal, and once again, my apologies for any alarm caused.

Rob Golding
Astutium Ltd

May 12

COMPLETED: Maintenance – Fibre Migration / Recabling GS2-THN

Planned Maintenance: Fibre Migration / Recabling GS2-THN

What: Migration of Fibre Routes Global Switch 2 < - > TeleHouse North

Affects: All Equipment in Global Switch 2

When: Sunday, 1825th May 2014 08:00 – 16:00

In order to allow for expansion within our GS2 DataCentre Facilities, the fibre-routes between GS2 and THE are being replaced/recabled and reconfigured.

No client services should be affected as we have multiple diverse routes – although the primary docklands fibre ring will be considered ‘at-risk’ during these works.

Astutium technicians will be onsite during the entire process to ensure minimal impact to the network and to test the new cabling structures meet our very high quality standards.

May 12

COMPLETED: Maintenance – Fibre Migration / Recabling GS2-THE

Planned Maintenance: Fibre Migration / Recabling GS2-THE

What: Migration of Fibre Routes Global Switch 2 < - > TeleHouse East

Affects: All Equipment in Global Switch 2

When: Saturday, 1724th May 2014 08:00 – 16:00

In order to allow for expansion within our GS2 DataCentre Facilities, the fibre-routes between GS2 and THE are being replaced/recabled and reconfigured.

No client services should be affected as we have multiple diverse routes – although the primary docklands fibre ring will be considered ‘at-risk’ during these works.

Astutium technicians will be onsite during the entire process to ensure minimal impact to the network and to test the new cabling structures meet our very high quality standards.

May 07

COMPLETED: Maintenance – Domain Registration : [*.uk]

At 07:00 (BST) on Tuesday 10 June 2014 Nominet will have a systems outage lasting about one hour when they will be deploying a software upgrade. During this time all .uk registration systems will be unavailable. The Automaton will not process email requests, but they will be received and queued for processing when it restarts.

May 07

COMPLETED: Maintenance – Domain Registration : [*.uk]

At 07:00 (BST) on Tuesday 3 June 2014 Nominet will have a systems outage lasting around thirty minutes when they will be carrying out systems maintenance. During this time all .uk registration systems will be unavailable. The Automaton will not process email requests, but they will be received and queued for processing when it restarts.

All other Nominet systems will continue to work as normal during this period.

Date Announced:
Wednesday, May 7, 2014 – 07:51
Status: Planned

Apr 10

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance: Hsphere-Win4 Hsphere-Win6 Windows/ASP Hosting Hsphere Cluster (websites)

Emergency Maintenance: Hsphere-Win4 Hsphere-Win6 Windows/ASP Hosting Hsphere Cluster (websites)

What: Security patching, hardenening and new firewall rules

Affects: Resellers/customers with websites HSPhere Cluster London1 Servers Win4 and Win6

When: 2014/04/10 06:00 – 12:00

Due to repeated attacks against the servers Win4 and Win6 we are implementing additional security measures and new firewall rules to ‘keep out’ all APNIC and LACNIC ip ranges, Open Proxies, and ‘hack friendly’ VPNs as well as millions of ‘zombie’ end user machines

During this work the server(s) wil intermittently be unavailable

If you are still having problems accessing your site(s) after midday please raise a support ticket.

Jan 24

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance – cPanel3

Emergency Maintenance: Disk Check
What: Following a forced reboot we are running a disk check.
Affects: All services provided by cPanel3 server.
When: Friday, 24th January 2014 15:55

All hosting (web/email) services hosted on cPanel3 server will be unavailable whilst the disk check is running.

Jan 24

COMPLETED: PHP Upgrade – DirectAdmin Hosting

Scheduled Maintenance: DirectAdmin Hosting

What: Upgrading PHP Version

Affects: All DirectAdmin Hosting services

When: Monday, January 27, 2014 from 20:00 to 22:00 GMT

During this maintenance window, email, dns, website and ftp functionality will be impacted.

For most up-to-date pre-packaged applications, this should have no effect.  However, custom sites, modules for pre-packaged software and templates may have been relying on older syntax or features that are now no longer allowed.

Jan 17

COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance: US Minecraft Hosting Servers

What: Migrating Minecraft Hosting Server8 to new hardware.
Affects: US Minecraft Servers 5,6,7,8 (US5-US8)
When: Wednesday, 22nd January 2014 12:00 – 18:00

As part of our ongoing commitment to providing the highest performance and reliability for the Astutium MineCraft Hosting Services, we are going to be migrating our US Minecraft Servers 5, 6, 7 and 8 to New Hardware.

This affects specific US Minecraft Hosting clients only – each will be contacted individually.

This will allow for “in-place” upgrades to larger and more powerful plans instantly and on-line through our client portal, and for you to get the fastest response and highest uptime possible for your Minecraft Server(s).

Due to the size of some worlds, number of plugins and players, we expect the actual time to copy each minecraft hosted server to a new machine to be around 30 minutes, and this will be undertaken on Wednesday 22nd January.

We already have a backup copy of the server content on our Cloud platform in London, so any migration can be “undone” as quick as possible if the copy fails for any reason (it is not expected to, but we like to be prepared)

On Wednesday afternoon we will …

  • shut down your Minecraft Server Virtual Machine
  • manually copy over all your files and settings to the new servers
  • confirm the copy has completed correctly
  • assign your new IP and update multicraft
  • email you the access details for your MineCraft Server
  • restart the MC server on the new hardware

Your IPv4 address(es) will be changing, due to the way they’re allocated by the Multicraft Control Panel.
If you are using one of our sub-domains to access your MC-Server this will be updated automatically.
If you are accessing by IP and Port, then you will need to put the new details into your minecraft launcher.

These steps are being taken to improve the performance of your service, to allow for some of the changes needed by the 1.7.x branch and for the extra ram and processing requirements of some of the updates and new features.

Additionally, we will now begin retiring all variations of the 1.5.x branch of Minecraft (1.7.x is the current version), so if you’re using the really old 1.4.x and 1.5.x versions currently, we advise you upgrade your launcher immediately and restart your minecraft server on a newer version JAR file through your control panel.

Finally, if you need a new Minecraft Server, or simply want a much bigger MC Server, we currently have available high-performance fully-dedicated MC servers and enough hardware to host around 2000 more minecraft servers in stock and ready to go – simply contact us for more details.