Dear Customer,
We would like you to know about the following planned maintenance window.
Service Affected: Full update of base systems and security enhancements of all server clusters
Impact: Minor Impact
Start Date: Friday the 07th of June 2022, 05:00 PM (UTC)
End Date: Saturday the 18th of June 2022, 05:00 PM (UTC) or much earlier if all goes well
Description:
We're using an extended maintenance window to complete the following on a per cluster basis:
- Update the systems to the latest software and OS versions (this will included 1 or 2 reboots per server and maybe a very limited downtime to adjust configurations)
- Replace any hardware parts that need replacing (preventative measures)
- Update PHP 7.x and add PHP 8.x (both latest production versions)
(this means that, as already announced in 2020, PHP 5.6 will not be available anymore.
If you need to, do make sure you update everything before this date and check if all is well afterwards).
- Update the databases servers to the latest version ( and switch to MariaDB where not the case yet)
- And we will also roll out further updates and major security-related enhancements.
Each server and cluster will first undergo maintenance and updates of its core to facilitate the move to the latest software versions.
All these steps will help us to get our quality, reliability and security to an even higher level.
This also gives us the opportunity to iron out some issues that we found along the way, and move all sites 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 gives us all more secure, stable and flexible options for the (near) future.
This all means that all websites and services on each server/cluster may temporarily not be available, for 1 or more short periods of time.
This work will be done per cluster to minimise downtime and to make sure all hands are on deck for each cluster-specific.
We may switch off certain services, such as mail, just 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
Friday, May 13, 2022
