The Road Ahead

Following on from the infrastructure maintenance earlier this week, we will undertaking routine maintenance on TAMAR later this evening, 15th May 2025 between 20:00 and 21:00 GMT/UTC. During this period there will be a short loss of connectivity whilst we restart a few services.

Web server logs - who actually uses them now? In the era of Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Matomo (to name but a few), who actually accesses statistics generated from web server logs? From our perspective, next to no-one. Apart from bots, there have probably been more visitors to Atlantis than to our various AWStats instances in the last couple of years.

So, are we abandoning them? No.

Firstly, we do have legal obligations to retain access records as per our Data Retention Policy. Secondly, web server logs do serve an important diagnostic function as they are the ultimate raw record of who accessed a site and when.

We are, though, making an important change to how data is stored.

Even the most lightly accessed website can generate substantial log data - 10 gigabytes or more for a whole year. As log files are included in disk usage calculations, we are implementing a policy of automatically archiving log data. Log data won't be deleted, but all records over five days old will automatically be compressed and stored within a dedicated archive folder in your web hosting package.

As always, you may download your log data at any time. We've also not changed our Data Retention Policy so your log data is retained for one year after which it is automatically deleted.

We are not planning to remove or disable AWStats. We've recently upgraded all running instances and implemented a revised automatic update process.

As always, if you have any questions please see the Statistics and Server Logs section of the Support Knowledgebase or contact us.

Our infrastructure provider will be undertaking scheduled maintenance on 13th May 2025 between 17:00 and 18:00 GMT/UTC that will impact our tamar.calzamedia.net server. This maintenance may cause a brief loss of connectivity - i.e. availability of services - for around five minutes.

Please note this maintenance is scheduled by our infrastructure provider and cannot be changed.

We advise all relevant customers to avoid performing any complex tasks (backups, uploads, updates etc) on their websites during this period.

As part of our rolling maintenance programme, we have updated Roundcube Webmail (which powers our Webmail service) and Adminer Database Management to their latest releases.

Webmail - Access Webmail | Webmail Support

Adminer Database Management - Access Adminer | Adminer/Database Support

In light of some recent support requests, we've updated the relevant article on Support Knowledgebase to explain why we don't provide remote access to our database servers.

A full explanation is available in the linked article, but the barebones reason is that remote access is too much of a security and infrastructure risk. We do offer a number of online alternatives to our customers to manage their hosted databases, details of which may be found in the Databases section of the Knowledgebase.