Firstly it is time to apologise. Following a period of great interest and growth it has become clear that elements or our service are not as protected as we would have liked. We have experienced a number of very unfortunate, and frustrating, periods of poor connectivity and downtime - this cannot continue.
Without going into too much detail, the main cause of this downtime has been certain websites on the server abusing the resources available to them causing things to slow down and eventually crash. It is our suspicion that at least 1 site on the shared platform has poor coding and programming which is resulting in infinite loops of commands (imaging 2 email accounts each with auto responders on, with each message triggering the others auto-responder and the entire process getting faster and faster until something gives in). This results in the server freezing up - and more frustrating is that when we fix things (often at cost with new hardware and support needed) the process often starts again - thus the yoyo effect seen recently.
SO, to deal with this we are working with the really helpful guys over at AISO.net (our datacentre) to start from scratch, we shall build a new server, migrate all accounts over to it with no impact on yourselves, and put in place a raft of new software’s and measures to restrict each accounts access to memory (RAM) and CPU (Processor) capacity. This should mean that any account abusing the server (whether intentionally or not) should not be able to affect other accounts or worst - the entire infrastructure.
We are trying to do this in a speedy and efficient way, however at the same time we really want to get things right and put an end to the madness, so please bear with us. We will be in touch with any affected accounts and also communicate the changes via this portal.
The maintenance schedule is very last minute however this weekend please expect limited functionality as follows:
Friday 7th - cPanel and webmail access will not be available from 10pm onwards
Saturday 8th - Migration of data between servers (websites should load fine, emails not affected)
Sunday 9th - Completion of transfer, DNS records will update causing some slowness but minimal downtime (hopefully just short bursts). cPanel and webmail access will be restored
I would like to thank you all once again for your continued patience and support. As we try to push boundaries and change our ways of thinking we need to react swiftly and firmly to these hurdles.
Sincerely
Tom
Friday, October 7, 2011
