Archive for the 'Behind the Scenes' Category

DNS, DNS, DNS……..

Anyone notice some downtime earlier this morning? First of all let me apologise, this was due to our main nameserver crashing after an automated system update. We were first made aware of the situation around 04:00 this morning, and we managed to rebuild the server by 06:00 however during this time, DNS servers around the world and cached invalid IP addresses for many of the websites on our system. Once our nameservers were sending out the correct IP addresses the cache was updated and the websites should have magically reappeared! Most of the websites were up and running by 10:00.

Our sytems administrators with the help of an external company are trying to find out exactly what caused the crash, however in the meantime, we have moved our nameservers onto new hardware and moved NS3 and NS4 onto new clusters to ensure this DOES NOT happen again.

I hope any customer that has been with us for a while knows that this sort of thing does not happen often, and as for our new customers, I cannot apologise enough and I hope we have not put you off.

I want to take this time to thank all our customers, and to wish you all a happy and successful 2009! Good luck with all your ventures!

Rack Move Complete!

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’