Silentweb Server Migration Notice

Posted on by Matt Simpson

I would just like to let you know that I am starting 2018 off by doing
some relatively significant server house cleaning for DigitalOrphans. This
major server upgrade will begin this week, and I will be moving all 400+
domains to a new better-faster-stronger server. This includes an upgrade to
all server components including Plesk Onyx 12.5, PHP 7.1, etc. It will also
include larger disk-space and data-transfer quotas for you at no cost and
multitude of new hosting account features.

I will notify you by e-mail before I migrate your account, but I do not
expect downtime during the transition. I would however advise you not to
make any changes to your website during the actual migration period.

Horde Webmail Folder Issue

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Please note that I was made aware of another issue this morning with the Horde webmail client. Essentially, mail within sub-folders appears to be missing. The messages are in fact there, they are just not being displayed. I will investigate further into this issue tonight, in the mean time domain administrators are encouraged to go into Mail Settings and change the webmail interface from Horde to Roundcube until the issue is resolved. My apologies for any inconvenience.

Scheduled Server Downtime Notification

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Please be advised that there is a scheduled server outage on Thursday,
November 27th at approximately 6:30AM EST that will affect all services
(web, e-mail, etc) on websrv03. This outage could last as long as 30
minutes while we perform important system maintenance.

I apologize for any inconvenience, and I hope to keep actual down time to a
minimum. If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate
to let me know.

Scheduled Server Migration Notice

Posted on by Matt Simpson

The time has come once again for server hardware migration. The current hardware on websrv02 has served us well over the years but the warranty is now up and it’s time to move to bigger and better hardware. The new server I have purchased sports x4 2.13GHz Intel CPU’s, 24 GB of RAM, and 1TB of RAID 1 disk, it’s also running the latest and greatest version of Plesk, as well as Apache 2.2, PHP 5.4, and MySQL 5.5. It has also been running for a few months now to ensure stability prior to actually migrating customers over.

The migration to the new server will begin this week, and I will contact you individually to let you know what day over the next 2 weeks I will migrate your account. Migrations will take place in the evenings, and do not require much (if any) downtime. Essentially your account is migrated to the new server, and then deleted from the old server. Once it has been deleted from the old server, it will be live within a few minutes on the new one.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to give me a shout.

We’re All Together Again

Posted on by Matt Simpson

I was trying to think exactly when it was that I decided to split our DigitalOrphans website load into two servers… I believe it was in 2005 when I was teaching at St. Lawrence College, and the program coordinator asked me to provide web-hosting for all of the graphic design students. That experience of hosting websites for cohorts of graphic design students went on for about 5 years, and during that time I met a lot of very interesting and very talented designers. I still provide hosting services and keep in touch with many of these folks today.

It has been a few years now since I stopped hosting websites for entire cohorts of design students, and with that decrease in demand on server resources, and an increase in processing power on servers I am pleased to announce that I have now been able to merge us back onto one server again.

This move not only makes it easier for me to maintain the server, but also less expensive to run the service, which will translate into cheaper prices for some clients at their next regular billing cycle.

There are lots of things in the works right now, and I will be posting more exciting news in the weeks ahead.

As always, if you run into any issues or require any assistance please feel free to contact me.

 

websrv02 Scheduled Maintenance

Posted on by Matt Simpson

A brief reminder that we have a scheduled outage this evening of websrv02 so that maintenance can be performed on the server. We will be upgrading to Plesk 10.3, PHP 5.3, and also doing some operating system upgrades. Please expect intermittent outages over the next few hours as these upgrades are completed. I will be sure to post a tweet when they are finished.

websrv01 Maintenance Completed

Posted on by Matt Simpson

A quick follow up regarding the emergency maintenance that took place last night. Work started at roughly 9:50PM EST, and service was fully restored by approximately 10:15PM EST. During the rebuilding of the RAID array all services were available, but servers’ performance was degraded. As of 2:30AM EST the RAID array was fully rebuilt, and all services are functioning normally at this time.

If you require any assistance or have any questions please feel free to let me know.

 

Emergency Maintenance on websrv01

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Please be aware that one of the hard drives in websrv01 has predictive failure, meaning that it is possible the drive could fail in the not-so-distant future. I have scheduled a Dell technician to be onsite this evening at 10:00PM EST to replace the drive in the machine, which requires me to schedule 30 to 60 minutes of downtime.

Downtime: Thursday, October 13th, 2011 @ 10:00PM EST for approximately 30 to 60 minutes.

Once the drive is replaced the server will be brought back online and will continue to operate while the RAID array is being rebuilt. You may notice some slowness of service over the next 24 hours while the array is being restored. We apologize for any inconvenience.