Advance notice of upcoming forum downtime.

[Adam]

I just got this notice from our server host

Dear Adam,

At this time it is my pleasure to announce that we here at ZONE.NET have finalized our new *owned* infrastructure in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Miami. We have now deployed over $250,000 worth of Enterprise Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerConnect switches in all four locations throughout the country, and are making plans to move forward in finalizing our presence in London and Toronto as well.

How this effects your service with us is that currently your Virtual Server resides on a node that is leased/rented from a third-party dedicated server provider, such as SoftLayer for example. The IP addresses you are using are also owned by the third-party dedicated server provider at each location, also limiting our capability and ability to provide the best possible hosting experience. We would like to begin migrating all Virtual Servers at each location in the following order: Los Angeles, New York and then Dallas. You can also request to be moved to Miami instead, since all four locations are now live. The migration will involve us cloning your Virtual Server and then re-assigning the new IP addresses and updating your control panel to recognize the new IP's, if necessary. The only major requirement on your part will be for you to update the IP addresses associated with your name servers at your registrar. Whether you have a managed or unmanaged server, we will be helping you throughout this migration to ensure a smooth transition. Although we don't expect any downtime because we will leave your old VPS running for at least 24 hours after the migration, we will be issuing a 4-day SLA credit to all customers that are migrating to our new *owned* Enterprise Dell PowerEdge servers as a token of our appreciation of your business and understanding of this mandatory move.


With this new deployment, rest assured that we have taken a step forward in terms of server hardware, technology and quality. We will now be deploying the latest Intel Woodcrest 5355 8-core processors (2.66 Ghz each!) and boasting an array of over 10 SA-SCSI 15,000 RPM Seagate Barracuda drives arranged in a RAID-1/10 configuration for the absolute fastest performance. You should also be aware that since we are now leasing datacenter space directly from the major telco hotels, we have also now increased our bandwidth connectivity, with more networks and faster connections added at all locations (New York, Dallas, Miami and Los Angeles). You should expect (and I personally guarantee it) faster performance from the servers and also from the network when this migration is complete.

The next step now is for you to await an email from us (by way of a new opened support ticket) indicating that your slot on the new server at the new location has opened up, and your new IP's will be provided to you as well. At that time we will begin cloning your Virtual Server with no downtime, and then we will modify the IP's, update the control panel if necessary and then send out a new Welcome E-Mail with the new login details and IP addresses. You should verify everything is set properly on your registrar, and then give us final confirmation and we will shut down the old Virtual Server. By default we will be migrating you from the existing old location to the new location in the same city, for example if you are currently in Dallas at the SoftLayer facility, you will be put in our new *owned* infrastructure within Dallas. If you prefer to use this migration as an opportunity to move your server to a different location, please contact us by replying to this email immediately and let us know where you would like to go. Due to the large number of customers, we expect this migration to occur from this coming Monday, the 22nd to November 5th. We will be shutting down servers as customers are migrated away successfully.

Again, please keep in mind this migration is mandatory, and we will be working with you regardless of whether you have a managed or unmanaged server with us to make sure that everything goes smoothly and you face the least amount of downtime. I hope you understand that some downtime is unavoidable in these type of situations, and I thank you in advance for your patience if there is, although I suspect our engineers won't allow that to happen.

Thank you again for being a loyal ZONE.NET customer, and all of us here do look forward to continue providing you with the absolute best in hosting experience.

Regards,

Sean K.

ZONE.NET

Short notice, which is annoying.

[Tovladian Soltyr]

BOO!, that's cool and sucks all at the same time :/

[Solidchrome]

Dont envy the techies..migrations can be a pain

[Nok]

Eh, no biggie. It's a good thing. The host has grown, buying their own servers, putting the new servers at a new leased co-located datacenter. Hosts do this, it's a normal part of the biz.

UOForums should see a nice bump in performance.

One suggestion... putting the forum into maintenance mode ASAP long enough to get some backups (yes, plural) in before tomorrow in case UOForums is on the migration schedule sooner rather than later (just to CYA); and maybe making a backup once a day until the migration is complete and working.

Don't want to rely on only the host's backups (in theory they'll back just before the migration, but delays happen sometimes, and the old VPS will still be running... that means activity beyond the backup.

I'll post a head's up on the toolbar.

[Adam]

Yea we do backups 5 times a day, all of which are saved to this server, then copied to a remote backup space
So I'm not worried about that part

[Nok]

I knew there was a reason I liked you.

[Queen Mum]

"I'll post a head's up on the toolbar."

...that's another reason why we like you.

*cookie thumbs up*

[DiP]

Thanks for the notice Adam.

Is my understanding correct though, that the only downtime we'd experience be from the actual time they shut this server down (meaning they've already cloned it to the new server) to when they send you the e-mail and you plug in the new IPs in the registry?

[Adam]

Kinda, the domain propagation sometimes takes upto 3 days to resolve to the new IP
There's probably a way around it, but I haven't figured that part out yet, heh

[DiP]

Oh, I think from what I remember about that it's all up to your ISP and out of anyone elses hands so I guess the down time will be determined on how quickly they (your ISP) update their records.