Please note that as part of our continued commitment to providing a first class hosting environment for our customers, we will be carrying out a planned upgrade of our power infrastructure and associated systems at our Glasgow Data Centre. This upgrade is primarily to improve our environment and power facilities in advance of future expansion.
Our Systems teams have carried out significant and detailed planning to ensure the upgrade goes smoothly. As part of that process we will be carrying out a controlled power down of sections of our data centre which will cause periods of downtime for some services.
Affected services will be:
– Iomartmail Email Services (Professional Mail, Microsoft Exchange)
– Shared Web Hosting (Pic n Mix, Starter, Starter Plus, Business etc.)
– Virtual Servers (All types)
– Dedicated Servers (All types)
As we will be powering down different sections at different times, not all services will be affected at the same time. We will be working to restore full power functionality to all services as quickly as possible, if this can be completed before the planned completion time we will of course do so.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused during this essential maintenance.
Kind Regards,
Customer Support
Update: Thursday 23rd April 2009
Please be advised that all preparatory work has now been completed and accordingly we will proceed with the power upgrade as scheduled for Sunday 26th April 2009 between 00:01 and 06:00.
As a recommendation, we always encourages customers to regularly backup critical data and accordingly we request that you carryout this activity before the work commences on the upgrade.
We have outlined below some general handy hints and tips for Systems Administrators during any major maintenance windows:
1. Always make sure your backups are up to date prior to any maintenance periods
2. Pause or re-schedule any CRON jobs or Scheduled Tasks for the duration of the notified outage window
3. Don’t leave any open files, configurations or projects on your servers when there is a chance of power being removed – you may lose all your work.
4. If the server is non-critical, schedule a shutdown for the maintenance window: our staff can always power your machine(s) back up – all you need to do is let us know what you’ll be shutting down and we’ll do the rest.
5. Make sure you log in to check your services after the migration completes to make sure everything is running as expected.
6. Finally, keep checking the system status pages or your email for updates.
Should you wish to do a graceful shutdown of your single power supply units before the work commences, please advise us in advance that you are doing this and we will assist you to reinstate your service once the upgrade is complete.
