Dear Customer,
We would like you to know about the following planned maintenance window.
Service Affected: Full update, moving of hardware and security enhancements of server cluster Arwen
Impact: Major Impact
Start Date: Thursday the 13th of August 2020, 10:00 AM (GMT)
End Date: Thursday the 13th of August 2020, 1:00 PM (GMT) or much earlier if all goes well
Description:
We're using a maintenance window to:
- move the whole server to a new, more powerful and reliable hardware platform
- We will move all servers and sites to PHP 7.x
(this means that PHP 5.6 will finally not be available anymore as it is too old and not in active maintenance anymore.
If you need to, do make sure you update everything before this date and check if all is well afterwards).
- we will also roll out major security-related enhancements.
At this time, server cluster Arwen is being prepared and will be undergoing maintenance and updates of its core to facilitate the move to new hardware and software versions.
This will help us to get our security to an even higher level, iron out some issues that we found along the way, and move all site and services to the current state of the software running the cluster and your website(s).
As most of this will be 'under the hood' work you may or may not see any changes, but it should help us solve some long-standing issues now and give us more secure, stable and flexible options for the (near) future.
This all means that all websites and services on this cluster may temporarily not be available for 1 or more short periods of time.
We may switch off certain services, such as mail, before we do the last copy actions to make sure that no data is lost when the old hardware is switched off and the new hardware is (re-)booting.
All other (Hosted) services and all Hosting & Domain services will continue to work as usual.
We will do our utmost to keep the downtime to a minimum.
We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause and if there are any questions, please contact our technical support team.
Kindest Regards
Support team
Update 14/08/2020:
Congrats to our whole team are in order.
Because of excellent and diligent preparations, the sites did not go down for more than a few minutes (and that was needed to make sure no data was lost at the moment of handing over).
Well done again
We are going through the whole cluster, all sites and all services to see if anything is missing or not working properly but all major and basic functions seem fine and all sites are online the way we expected them to be.
If you do run into something unexpected or see something that has 'changed' since the move, please let us know.
And for us, first things first is to make sure everything is working perfectly, faster and more secure than ever.
Saturday, August 8, 2020
