It only took 5 hours to complete but we managed to move our whole platform across the road from BlueSquare 1 to BlueSquare 3! We managed to keep downtime to a minimum (I think it was less than 30 minutes!) and I just wanted to say thanks to all our customers for making the move as easy as it was! We could not have done it while answering hundreds of tickets asking why the servers are down!
Moving to BSQ3 now means we have more space (and power) to expand on our services, namely dedicated servers and new backup solutions.
On that note, I would also like to thank our dedicated server customers for voting for us on the Dedicated Server Directory! Thanks to you we won the September award for ‘Best UK Windows Servers’
On the morning and afternoon of the 2nd of July we had two power failures. The first knocking out our VPS’s for 4 hours, and our shared platform for 5 minutes, the other in the afternoon knocking out all platforms for 5 minutes. Ok, 5 minutes is not long but it caused a number of problems for us.
Better yet, everyone else’s racks where still running! What went wrong?
Well according to the staff at BlueSquare, the nightshift staff where working on some nearby racks and managed to ‘dislodge’ out some power cables! After getting everything back up, we raised a ticket and got a reply with an apology which said:
we’ve moved the other customer’s cabling to avoid this from re-occuring.
Well then why on earth did this happen again! We are let to find out. We have also been looking into the new BlueSquare MK Datacentre. This would help us keep our costs low (even with the increased cost in power) as well us giving us much more room to expand.
Apologies for any inconveniences caused, and as usual we will keep you updated with any updates.
In the mean time we are fitting our own UPS units in all our racks to ensure if something like this happens again, your data will be available.
We will soon be introducing a new backup system to all our clients. R1Soft are specialists in Continuous Data Protection, Long story short, we will be increasing our frequency of backups from once a night to many times a day (tbc). Even better than that, we can reduce our disaster recovery times from several hours, to less that one hour thanks to R1Soft’s ‘Bare Metal Restore’ feature.
We will be testing the new system for the majority of July and we will annouce the date we go live towards the end of the month. There is one feature which will benefit our clients directly, we will be offering clients the option of restoring backups of their hosting accounts from our backups, something that most hosts do not allow. This way you will no longer need to contact customer support to have a backup restored.