Dec 26

COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance: Website and Client Portal Upgrade

Scheduled Maintenance: Astutium Client Portal

What: Upgrade of Client Portal and Main Website to new version

Affects: Astutium Website and Client Portal Only – no client services affected

When: Thursday, Decemeber 26, 2013 from 4:30 to 10:30 GMT

Planned maintenance on the Astutium Client Portal to upgrade to a new version:
* New control facilities for Virtual Private Servers
* New ccTLD Domain Names available to register
* Additional languages supported on Order Forms
* Updates and Security Patches

During this maintenance window access to our website and client portal will be unavailable.

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve systems in order to provide you with the best possible services and greater online management facilities for your services.

Nov 19

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance – EnsimWin1 (Thomas)

Emergency Maintenance: Hosting EnsimWin1 (Thomas)

What: Failure of Hosting Server EnsimWin1

Affects: Resellers/customers with websites on EnsimWin1

When: 2013/11/19 13:09

Update 1: 17:00 service has been restored – if you have further problems please raise a support ticket.

Oct 25

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance – HSphere

Emergency Maintenance: Power
What: Migrating to alternate power feed.
Affects: HSphere hosting services.
When: Friday, 25th October 2013 17:00 – Friday, 25th October 2013 17:15

The HSphere servers will be powered down and moved to an alternate power feed.

MySQL/MSSQL and web services will be unavailable for a short period of time whilst they are moved.

Oct 09

COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance: HSphere Hosting

Scheduled Maintenance: HSphere Hosting

What: Migration of HPshere Servers to new Power System

Affects: UK HSphere Email and Website Hosting

When: Friday, October 11, 2013 from 14:30 to 15:30 GMT

Planned maintenance by the datacentre on the power to some racks will occur on 11/October/2013, which will have short-term impact on all HSphere Hosting Services as machines will be moved to a 2ndary powerfeed

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

A server downtime of approx 15 minutes is anticipated during this maintenance window as each is moved to the new power system.

No data-loss is expected, our UK Network Engineering Team will be taking all necessary precautions to mitigate any issues during the maintenance window.

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve systems in order to provide you with the best possible services and highest possible uptime.

Sep 14

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance – Plesk 3

Unfortunately hosting server platform Plesk-3 has failed beyond repair.

This will be affecting any services (email, ftp, web, mysql) you had running on that server.

Technicians are working on restoring our last good backup to new hardware, however this is likely to take several days at least.

You have 2 options, and we would be grateful if you’d let us know which you’d prefer…

*1 – New Hosting Account

If you have a local copy of your website/files (or recent local backup), or only used the account for emails and did not have a website, then the quickest way to get you back online is for us to create you a new hosting account on our new platform, and then you can access the control panel to add email addresses, and copy back up your website – this may mean you updating the nameservers on your domain if not registered with us – details will be provided if this is the case

* 2 – Wait For Restore

If you do not have local copies of your website files (and databases etc if db-driven/dynamic) then we wil continue to restore the server backups and then move your hosting account onto a new server once this has completed. There is no ETA on this as yet – best ‘guess’ based on the amount of data to recover (several terrabytes) and the speed of the restore software etc, this will take at least 3 days possibly longer.

If you could let us know whether you’d prefer a new account and to upload your files rather than waiting for the restore, we can get you setup immediately on the new systems.

Pleae accept our applogies for the inconvenience, issues with our hosting services are very rare, and complete hardware failure rarer still, and we are working on resolving this as quickly as possible

Update 1 (2013/09/17 21:59): The server has been restored. If you are still having problems with the service please raise a support ticket.

Sep 04

COMPLETED: PHP Upgrade – cPanel Services

Due to major security issues with the currently deployed version of the PHP runtime, and the appearance of 0-day exploits for these issues; we have been forced to upgrade PHP to the latest 5.4 branch on all cPanel services.

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.

If you have used the Softaculous 1-click-installer, please make sure you update your installations as soon as possible.  Otherwise you may need to make adjustments or changes to the code of your site or obtain upgrades from 3rd party vendors.

We apologise that this announcement could not have been made sooner, however the nature and urgency of the issues prevented that.

Aug 23

COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance: US Minecraft Servers

Scheduled Maintenance: US Minecraft servers

What: Migrating US Minecraft servers to new hardware.

Affects: US Minecraft servers

When: Monday, 26th August 2013 12:00 – Monday, 26th August 18:00

 

As part of our review of the Astutium (inc Othello and EliteHosting) MineCraft Hosting Services following the launch of 1.6.x, we are going to be migrating our US Minecraft Servers to New Hardware.

This affects our US Servers only, EU servers have already been upgraded.

This will allow for “in-place” upgrades to larger and more powerful plans instantly and on-time 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 your minecraft server to a new machine to be around 30 minutes, and this will be undertaken on Monday 26th August.

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 Monday 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 the changes needed by 1.6.2 (now available in your control panel) and for the extra ram and processing requirements of the 1.6.x branch.

Additionally, we are now officially retiring all variations of the 1.4.x branch of Minecraft (1.6.x is the current version), so if you’re using the really old 1.4.7+ versions currently, we advise you upgrade immediately to a newer version 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-dedictaed MC servers and a 16% discount on Server Upgrades to your current package – contact us for more details.

Aug 15

COMPLETED: Scheduled Maintenance: Astutium Ltd US network

Scheduled Maintenance: Astutium Ltd US network.

What: Software upgrades on the network routers and switches.

Affects: US Website Hosting, US Dedicated Servers, US Virtual/Cloud Servers and US (All) and UK (Multicraft access only) Minecraft Gaming Services.

When: Thursday, August 22, 2013 from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. GMT

 

Planned maintenance on the Astutium Ltd US network will occur on 22/August/2013, which will have some impact on all US Website Hosting, US Dedicated Servers, US Virtual/Cloud Servers, US (All) and UK (Multicraft access only) Minecraft Gaming Services.

During this maintenance window, we will be performing necessary software upgrades on the network routers and switches.

 

A network downtime of 15 minutes is anticipated after uploads during this four hour maintenance window, and a 5-10 minute outage of connectivity to each server in turn as it is moved to the new switching fabric.

 

No servers are being powered off, this is a network cabling and software maintenance only.

 

No data-loss is expected, our US Network Engineering Team will be taking all necessary precautions to mitigate any issues during the maintenance window.

 

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve systems in order to provide you with the best possible services and highest possible uptime.

Jul 09

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance: cPanel5

Emergency Maintenance: Hosting cPanel5 (DNS)

What: DNS propagation/distribution issues for domains on cPanel5

Affects: Resellers/customers with websites and email services on cPanel5

When: 2013/07/09 10:00

Update 1 (2013/07/09 12:02): The issue has now been resolved. If you are still having problems with the service please raise a support ticket.

Jun 20

COMPLETED: Emergency Maintenance: Plesk1 (Duck)

Emergency Maintenance: Hosting Plesk 1

What: Unexpected Disk Failure of Hosting Server Plesk-1

Affects: All resellers/customers with websites and email services on Plesk 1

When: 2013/06/20 10:10

Engineers are onsite investigating the extent of the problems.

It is currently expected that a new server will need to be deployed (ETA 12 hours) and hosting/email accounts recreated.

Update 1 (20/06/2013 11:40): Engineers are now confident they will be able to restore the data to replacement disks in the same server, as yet there is no complete ETA for the restore – so we are standing by the 12 hour estimate.

Update 2 (20/06/2013 14:12): Data from the latest stable backup point (19/06/2013 00:00) has been restored. If you are still having problems with the service please raise a support ticket.