The Road Ahead

As is traditional at the time of year, in between mince pies and other festivities we will be installing some upgrades and undertaking routine maintenance on our systems. Wherever possible, we schedule this work to take place at time of low activity and interruption. Typically, the period between Christmas and New Year is such a time.

We don't anticipate any substantial downtime or upgrade work. If there will be any downtime periods in excess of five minutes, we will announce them in advance through our regular channels.

Further updates on the installed upgrades and any new or enhanced features or services will be released in the near future.

We will be performing routine maintenance on our TAMAR server later tonight (24th September 2021) after 8pm. We anticipate the total time required will be around 30 minutes to one hour.

During this period, there may be slight impairments to services or the occasional period of service unavailability.

We will update this post when the maintenance has been completed.

We will be performing some routine server maintenance from around 20:00 tonight (UK/GMT time). There may be a slight impairment of our services whilst this work is taking place.

As always and updates or changes will be posted here and on our Twitter feed.

We have removed support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 from our servers with immediate effect (16:00, 26th March 2020). This has been done to enhance the security of our services and is accordance with best practices as outlined in IETF RFC 7525. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have known security issues and there are no fixes or patches available.

If you are using a certificate based on either of these protocols, you must update them with a TLS 1.2+ certificate immediately. If you are, or wish to be, PCI-DSS compliant, you should adopt TLS 1.2+.

Most mainstream web browsers will cease support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.2 in the first half of 2020. Approximate deadlines are:

• Microsoft IE & Edge - first half of 2020
• Mozilla Firefox - March 2020
• Safari/WebKit - March 2020
• Google Chrome - January 2020

Most web browsers will issue a security warning if you attempt to connect to a website using either TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1. To ensure you receive the best possible protection, we advise you to upgrade your web browser to the latest version. Most web browsers will do this automatically.

Let's Encrypt / SSLForFree Certificates

All free certificates generated through our hosting control panel since the beginning of March have been TLS 1.2+.

We are currently upgrading the software used by our hosting control panel (https://cp.calzadamedia.net). During this upgrade there may be short periods when the control panel will be unavailable.

This upgrade work will not affect any of our services (websites, email etc).

To track progress and read updates, see Alerts & Notices.