As part of our commitment to keep our servers and software up to date, we’ve upgraded Apache to 2.2.10 and phpMyAdmin to 3.0.0. If you have any questions, please let us know.
Thanks!
Archive for October, 2008
Apache 2.2.10 & phpMyAdmin 3.0.0
Thursday, October 16th, 2008The Migration Aftermath
Thursday, October 9th, 2008Before I begin, I just wanted to let you guys know how grateful we are for your considerable patience and understanding during this migration process. As much as I would like to say the migration turned out as seamless as promised, I can’t. The automated migration process began on time at 11:59PM PST last night, but we ran into a flood of errors upon restoring the just generated backups on our new platform. That lead to scattered account files and non-existant/conflicting DNS zones. We aborted the migration roughly around 1AM due to repeated errors, but numerous DNS zones were not restored to our old server successfully. This affected approximately half of our customers and was quickly brought to our attention / resolved.
Fortunately, that’s the extent of the bad news. The migration was restarted today and completed successfully without a single error after refining the migration process. All user account files, databases, emails, DNS zones, etc. have been successfully transferred over to sydney.vectorlevel.com - 67.222.10.32. DNS will take up to 24 hours to refresh for your visitors. Customers with dedicated IPs will receive an email with their newly assigned IP address.
We understand how much of an impact this migration likely had on your website(s) and as promised, we have issued every customer a credit equal to one free month of hosting for their next invoice. For customers who had invoices due in the next few weeks, we canceled those and changed the due dates to make them one month ahead.
We truly apologize for the delay in this announcement and the inconvenience caused by this migration as a whole. Since the migration started and failed last night, we’ve been swamped for over 12 hours resolving numerous errors and responding to support tickets. Again, we are extremely pleased to have such understanding customers and we thank you for being so patient.
If you have any questions whatsoever, please send us a support ticket and we’ll get to you right away.
[Maintenance] New Platform Migration & Other Notes
Sunday, October 5th, 2008We know, we know. Jonathan said in our last blog post that we’d be ready to release everything by this week and it turns out that this week is over in a few hours. Unfortunately, we do not have everything ready and will be forced to delay this. We have been told to expect our coded design by Wednesday, so that should definitely be up at the latest by Friday of this coming week. Our new service targeted at web designers/developers is likely to be released separately from our design after we work out some kinks in our implementations. However more importantly, we have decided to push toward deploying a new virtualized platform for our shared hosting product line. This concept has been discussed numerous times and planned for next year, but we think right now is a perfect time to implement this new virtualized and dynamically scalable shared platform. Our new website will more accurately discuss what this new platform means and how it benefits you.
Thus for several reasons, we need to migrate all current customers to this new virtualized platform ASAP. We have an automated migration planned for exactly Wednesday, October 8th at 11:59PM PST. You do not need to do anything in terms of your account as this will be an entirely seamless migration. One point of concern though is for customers running forum communities. We highly recommend that you put your forum on “maintenance mode” a few minutes after 11:59PM with a message explaining that you’re undergoing a server migration. This way, visitors with the new DNS will see your forum while visitors on the old DNS will see the maintenance message.
We understand the significant inconvenience this may cause for you especially after we just recently did a server migration that involved much of the same processes. When the migration is completed, we will apply 1 month of free hosting to each and every one of our customers’ accounts. Hopefully, this makes this migration more tolerable.
Again, we offer our apologies for such a short notice for a significant migration, but we promise you that it’ll be well worth it. Get ready to shake up the shared hosting industry. Traditional shared hosting will be left behind.