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).

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.

We will be upgrading the installed version of Perl from version 5.14 to 5.16 tomorrow. Although we will aim to keep any interruption to an absolute minimum, there may be a short period of around 5-10 minutes when access to the website statistics (AwStats) may be impaired.

To keep track of our status, and the uptime of our services, please see http://status.calzadamedia.net

Update 25th September 2012

We've delayed the upgrade of Perl to v5.16 for the foreseeable future.

As part of our normal maintenance cycle, we will be performing routine maintenance on the 21st September 2012 between 20:00 and 21:00 BST. During this period, the performance of some services may be temporarily impaired.

To keep track of our status, and the uptime of our services, please see http://status.calzadamedia.net

The NAME Internet registry (handles all domains ending in .name) will be offline for scheduled maintenance on the 16th September between 0100 and 0500 GMT/UTC.

Any orders submitted for .name domain registration made during this period will not be processed until the maintenance has been completed.