The Road Ahead

We will be performing routine maintenance and upgrades to our mail services from around 21:00 GMT tonight (25th February 2026). This will - inevitably - result in some service interruption as updates are applied and the relevant services are restarted.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to one and all.

As in previous years, we'll be using the (hopefully) quieter time between Christmas and the New Year to install upgrades and updates.

We've made a few alterations to our Legal Documents and Policies overview and revised our Free Software Licence.

Changes to Legal Documents and Policies page

We've revised the wording of the Legal Documents and Policies overview page to make the language easier to understand and to add a general clarification as to the legal framework we operate under - we are a UK company registered in England and Wales and operate under English Law.

There have not been any alterations to individual Legal Document and Policies.

Free Software Licence

Our Free Software Licence is the licence that applies, unless otherwise stated, to our free software tools and utilities like Cerberus and the Online Support Tools.

We've reworded and condensed the licence to make it easier to understand. The underlying principles remain the same: the software is released "AS IS" and you use it entirely at your own risk.

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.