This announcement is to provide notice of a datacentre move that will affect all our customers on UK servers.
Date and time: Saturday 26th November 2011 from 10pm and 6am (GMT)
--- Part one ---
Our upstream colocation provider operates multiple datacentre facilities and we have recently been informed of their decision not to continue offering services at the London Hosting Centre (LHC)
We will therefore need to physically transition our equipment to their newer facility (Centro).
This decision comes following a detailed review of their facilities and a continued commitment to providing the highest quality web hosting services.?? With LHC not being an owned building, our upstream provider does not feel confident that 100% uptime SLA's can be met into the future as they have limited or no control over certain aspects of building management.
The newer Centro facility is based within a dedicated 50,000 sq. ft. secure compound in Hemel Hempstead and has a specification exceeding that of LHC with 100% uptime SLA's, enhanced security and a more robust network.? We have had equipment at Centro for over two years and have experienced superb uptime throughout.
The relocation is being performed by a specialist datacentre moving team, making use of specialist vehicles, with full insurance cover in place for all equipment.? This is the same firm that we used in 2006 during our Redbus to LHC datacentre migration ? which went perfectly ? and we are extremely confident that this transition will go just as well.
Please note that aside from the downtime, all domains, email accounts, settings, server names, IP addresses and everything else will remain the same. Any email sent to you will not be lost but queued until servers are back online.
We have implemented a system which will display a customized holding page throughout the duration of the planned maintenance.? In this way, along with emails being queued, search engine bots will know to come later and web requests to your domain will serve a temporary maintenance page rather than the dreaded 404 not-found error which is also bad for SEO.
We will automatically serve our own default, generic, and unbranded holding page.
This will return a ?HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable? header and the relative maintenance page. No redirection - your domain will remain in the URL bar of browsers.
No change of IP addresses or DNS is required.? When your hosting server is brought back online the maintenance page will automatically disappear.
--- Part two ---
To avoid further downtime at a later date, we will also take this opportunity to upgrade PHP from 5.2.x to 5.3.x across all servers.? As PHP 5.2 was deprecated some time ago and therefore no longer supported, all customers should ensure that websites are compatible with PHP?s 5.3.x branch.
For the techies;
Incompatibilities between 5.3.x and the 5.2.x branch can be found here: http://php.net/migration53
To help in case your website is running a system that is not yet compatible, our servers now have the capability of running multiple PHP versions on a per folder basis.? To enable this functionality, please login to the control panel of your web hosting account and navigate accordingly to:
cPanel > Software > PHP Version Manager
If you website is not yet PHP 5.3 compatible, please ensure you enable this functionality prior to the scheduled maintenance. Please advise your webmaster and/or developers.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to open a support ticket.
http://www.hostbaron.com/client/submitticket.php
We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience during the move.
