The Road Ahead

As followers to our Twitter feed may have noted, we had a few issues yesterday with mail services on our THAMES server. The backend database server was performing poorly and this in turn affected the performance of our mail server. We soon had a fix in place and normal mail service was resumed within 20 minutes of our initial tweet.

As our mail services operate independently of our web hosting, no customer websites would have been affected by the database server issues. If a customer website used our mail servers to send out messages, they would have still have been processed, albeit slowly.

Hard Disk Shennanigans

Unfortunately, as we were tracking down the database issues we detected a potentially serious problem with one of THAMES' hard disks. To correct this, we took THAMES offline at 22:30 last night (10th) to perform corrective maintenance work. Although this did take several hours, the problem has been resolved. We have verified this again this morning.

Maintenance Work

Over the forthcoming weekend (12th/13th), we will be undertaking routine maintenance work on THAMES. Inevitably, we will have to restart the server at least once or twice as part of the maintenance cycle so there will be some momentary (about 5 minutes) of downtime during the weekend. Wherever possible, we try and do maintenance work outside of what we consider to be the working part of the day (08:00 to 20:00).

Happy New Year 2013 to all our Customers and Partners.

As part of our rolling program to continually improve our services, we have upgraded our hosting control panel to the latest version of WebsitePanel.

The newer version includes new features and updates that enable customers to more finely manage their Calzada hosting accounts. One key new feature that many of our customers have asked for is now available - the ability to set expiry dates for auto-responder/out of office messages.

As there are some differences between the old and new version of WebsitePanel, we will be updating some articles within our knowledgebase shortly. If you have any suggestion or queries, please do get in touch.

The data centre that hosts our Thames server will be performing maintenance on the 22nd November between 23:00 and 04:00. The nature of the maintenance will require Thames to be offline for a short period of time. This will impact the availability of some services like e-mail and websites.

Although the maintenance window is for 5 hours, the expected downtime is for around 30 minutes. We will post an update here and on our Twitter feed when normal service has resumed.

As always, you can track our uptime at http://status.calzadamedia.com.

It's nearly ready! We're currently putting the finishing touches to the latest version of Camino CMS. Camino is our own content management system, or CMS, and version 0.5.3 is our best release yet containing new features, capabilities and improvements. Camino can now be found powering a diverse range of websites from personal blogs through to complex intranet applications.

If you are an existing Camino customer and hold a current support contract, you will be entitled to an upgrade of your Camino installation to 0.5.3. We will contact individual customers to discuss upgrade arrangements once 0.5.3 has been released.

Although v0.5.3 will be the stable release of Camino for the near term, we are already planning for subsequent versions. If you have suggestions on improvements or new capabilities, please get in touch.