Status Centre

Resolvedover 4 years ago

All the servers have been successfully rebooted.

Updateover 5 years ago

We had to increase the maintenance window for the reboots. These reboots will have to be performed between 18:00 and 06:00 (UK local time), however some systems may be updated outside of this window.

Fixingover 5 years ago

As part of our continuing effort to ensure the stability of our infrastructure and products, over the coming weeks, we will be performing reboots overnight on a large number of servers across our different hosting platforms. This is in order to apply important patches and updates to our servers.

Why we patch and update our servers?
Patches are updates that incorporate changes in source code. They can be applied to the Linux or Windows kernel. Or to applications and to our hardware systems code. These updates are important as they not only improve stability and performance but also remove known security vulnerabilities.

Most updates can and are applied without the need for a reboot, however, there are a few that still require us to reboot the servers for them to install.
The maintenance window for these reboots will be between 18:00 and 06:00 (UK local time), however some systems may be updated outside of this window.

All the reboots will be performed and monitored by the infrastructure team System Administrators based at our Data Centre.

For clients on Shared cPanel hosting and Dedicated Servers, we expect the downtime to be between ten to twenty minutes. There are cases where these will take longer regrettably there is no way to predict these systems and we will do our very best to ensure downtime is kept to an absolute minimum.
For clients on out Gridhost 'cloud' platform, the majority of the server reboots will not affect you. The exceptions will be when the MySQL database servers are updated and some clients may notice they can not connect to the email platform for a short time. Again this should be no more than ten to twenty minutes.

VPS clients may experience longer downtime as we update the hypervisor platform (the physical servers that you Virtual Private Server runs on), we expect this to be in the region on twenty to forty minutes as we have additional updates to apply here and we need to shut down the VPSs before we can apply these updates.

We do understand that for some clients downtime of any sort at any time can affect business, we are doing everything posable to ensure these updates are as smooth and painless an experience as we can.