Monthly Archives: May 2014

Maintenance Sunday 18th May @1AM

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We will be performing essential maintenance work on our VPS host servers between 1AM – 2AM BST on Sunday 18th May. During this window  your VPS will be unavailable for up to 20 mins while the host server is rebooted. Before rebooting we will be sending each VPS an ACPI Shutdown signal. If you have configured your VPS to respond to this, it will start it’s shutdown procedure, and shutdown cleanly. If you would like help configuring your VPS to respond to this, please raise a support ticket and we will be happy to help.

We’d like to apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by this essential work.

Update 2:35AM – Most of the work has now been completed. However, the work is taking longer than anticipated, and we have gone past the end of the maintenance window, which we’d like to apologise for. Therefore, some customers have yet to see their VPS become unavailable, and will do so soon. We will update here as soon as the work is fully complete.

Update 4:05AM – This work is now fully complete. We’d like to apologise for extended the window, the work took a lot longer than anticipated.  Total downtime experienced for each VPS, however, was not longer than was planned.  All VPS are now running as normal, but if you are experiencing any problems with your VPS at this point, please do raise a support ticket so we can look into it. Thanks to everyone for your patience during this essential work.

Improvements to data storage resilience

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We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently completed moving all VPS data to a new storage subsystem that mirrors all data across more than one physical server.

Prior to this, VPS data was stored on the RAID card attached to the physical server the VPS was running on. Although this provided good data safety by mirroring across multiple drives, the RAID card itself was a single point of failure.

The new storage subsystem eliminates this single points of failure.  Even if we were to suffer the complete failure of all disks attached to a physical machine and/or the complete failure of a raid card, including the situation where a raid card might inflict data corruption to all disks attached to it, this will not affect the VPS disk data on that machine. Additionally, providing that the physical server OS continues running, all VPS’ would be able to continue running without interruption in the face of such a disaster, due to the surviving network mirror on another physical machine.

Another storage related improvement we are planning to introduce over the coming months is the ability for customers to take snapshot backups of their VPS storage data, which will be stored elsewhere on our network. This would allow customers to restore their VPS disk data to a previous “known good” point in time e.g. if their VPS OS becomes unbootable, or is compromised by malicious activity/trojan/virus. We will announce on this blog as soon as we have rolled out this feature.