New Scheduled Downtime Notice
I would like to notify you that there will be some scheduled downtime on both of our servers this coming weekend while we perform scheduled maintenance tasks and upgrades on both of the production machines.
websrv02: Friday, January 30th at 10:00PM EST
websrv01: Saturday, January 31st at 10:00AM EST
The first downtime should not be too much longer than a few hours per server; however, Plesk upgrades have in the past went over our maintenance window so I hesitate to give a precise amount of time (~1 – 2 hours). There will be a second downtime after the Plesk upgrade is finished, which should be very brief (~15 minutes) as we apply operating system patches and reboot the servers.
During this maintenance window we will be upgrading both servers to the latest and greatest Plesk release (details below), as well as doing all of the regular operating system patches, and a PHP 5.2.6 upgrade.
Plesk 9.0.1 Upgrade
This is a significant Plesk upgrade that has many changes including a rather new visual interface. I will caution you that the new interface is different, and while you will need to learn the new way Plesk operates, I am sure that the new features will make up for any inconvenience.
Here are some of the many new features you may notice:
- New visual interface.
- Ability to add your logo and branding to control panel.
- New optional web-mail client called AtMail.
- Upgraded version of IMP / Horde web-mail client.
- Option to run PHP in FastCGI mode.
- Ruby on Rails support.
- Ability to throttle bandwidth on high traffic sites.
- Very much improved website backup and restore tools.
- New anti-spam techniques (i.e. DomainKeys).
- Better support for Safari 3.1.
- The usual bug fixes and security hardening.
Website Backups and Account Cleanup
We do fairly regular backups of our servers as part of our disaster recovery plan, but if something happened would you have a backup of your content? I would hope that the answer to that question is yes, but in case it is not now is a good time to remind you.
Please make sure that you keep backups of your websites, databases and e-mail.
While you are looking into what you need to backup, check for things you can delete. If there are old domains in your account they *must* be deleted. Old web-applications *must* be removed or upgraded to the latest release.