Our network provider (RapidSwitch) are planning a network upgrade, which will add greater capacity, redundancy, future proofing and also allow us to offer you new services such as IPv6.

We are planning to implement this upgrade in two phases over the coming weeks, with the first scheduled window being 1st December between the hours of 01:00 am and 06:00 am GMT. During this window you will experience a very short period of connectivity interruption of less than two minutes as we change the routing configuration from the current equipment to four fully redundant network segments. The second phase, details of which will be released in a separate communication, will involve the migration of the rack uplinks to the new network segments. Once again as a consequence of implementing Phase 2, you will also experience a period of less than two minutes of connectivity interruption.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, and hope that you’ll appreciate that we are undertaking this action to ensure that we can continue to provide you with the best hosting service available.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions concerning this notification.

Update:
We have been awaiting an update from our network provider for stage 2, expecting it to have been completed December 2011/January 2012. Upon contacting them after waiting for an email, stage 2 will be started in the coming months of 2012. Once we have confirmation of the date, we’ll start a new post on this status blog.

We’ve been informed by our datacentre that they’ll be replacing a faulty PDU on Thursday 30th June 2011. This will cause a small amount of downtime while servers are shutdown and then the PDU is replaced. Hopefully if everything goes well there should be approximately 10 minutes of downtime, while all servers are connected to the new PDU.

This maintenance only applies to our clients hosted in our Newcastle datacentre.

Date: 30/06/2011
Time: 7PM – 9PM UK Time
Downtime: Approx 10 Minutes
Reason: PDU Replacement

Update (30/06/2011 20:33):
This maintenance has went smoothly as planned. There was a small outage due to the PDU being changed which according to monitoring lasted under 1 minute, which is better than we had expected.

If you’re having any problems connecting to your website or server, please contact us as soon as possible. From our own monitoring there doesn’t appear to be any problems.

We’ve updated the CloudLinux kernel on our shared and reseller servers. When a new kernel is installed, it requires a quick reboot, so there was a small downtime of 2 minutes.

The new kernel fixes several internal limits and was applied at a time we see very little traffic to our servers (3AM).