The Road Ahead

We're currently experiencing problems with the database that powers our primary mail server and webmail. We are actively looking into this and aim to restore normal service as soon as possible.

This problem only affects our standard mail services. Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Web Hosting along with any associated database are unaffected.

Update 16:00

The issue was traced to a corrupt database file. This has been successfully repaired and all mail services restored.

As part of last night's work, we've upgraded PHP to v5.5.11. We've also enabled Windows Cache Extensions for PHP, to further increase the performance of PHP websites.

If you are about to deploy/publish a PHP website, don't forget to enable PHP as it is normally disabled.

In light of the technical issues with mail services over the weekend, we have brought forward some scheduled maintenance work to tonight. To avoid interruptions during standard business hours, we plan to do the work between 22:00 and 23:30 tonight (Monday 11th August 2014).

Unfortunately, this maintenance will require a short period of downtime whilst some software upgrades are installed. We anticipate that mail services will be offline for around 10 to 15 minutes.

We will post further updates on our blog and Twitter feeds.

Update 00:30 12th August

All mail services have been restored. We're currently re-indexing all mail messages, so mail service performance may be degraded until this has finished.

You may have noticed that we had a few a technical issues over the weekend (saturday) that affected our mail services. These issues are now fixed and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We suffered a bit of a domino affect. A hard disk error caused a database failure that in turn stopped our mail servers from processing and routing e-mail messages. We were still receiving messages, but they were just building up in a big queue awaiting sorting and delivery. Once the underlying issue had been resolved, all outstanding messages were processed and delivered as normal.

All web hosting and associated services (and their associated databases) were not affected by these issues and continued to operate as normal.

We will performing scheduled maintenance on the THAMES server between 19:00 and 19:30 BST today. Although we expect minimal interference, services and websites running on THAMES may be temporary unavailable whilst they are being restarted.

To keep track of our status, visit our Network and Service Status. If you have a question, send us a message.