Following our continued program of improvements to our network, we would like to let you know that we are now starting the process of some further upgrades to our entire network, which is something that we have been planning for quite some time now. We are investing in a considerable amount of new additional network infrastructure hardware and this will enable us to bring you further improvements in both network speed, & resilience, but also faster support response times and a wider range of services and options available to customers. For dedicated server customers, we will be also able to offer additional features such as KVM/IP, remote reboot ports & private VLANS. We appreciate that some of the details below may not be something that you fully understand, however please do feel free to contact us if you have any questions or require any clarification as to how this may affect your account.
One of the first changes that we will be making is a change to our current power and network transit provider. Our current supplier is not offering us the flexibility that we require and also we have seen a 50% rise in our costs from them over the last year over two price rises from them, mainly however due to the well known increases in electricity prices. This has meant quite a difference in our operating costs, yet we have successfully managed not to pass these costs on to our customers. The upgrades that we are performing now will not only mean that we can ensure that our prices continue to remain as low as they are now, but there is also the possibility of even more features or higher account limits offered in the future.
The change in our transit provider will however mean that all of our IP addresses will change. Whilst we do have our own range of IP addresses currently assigned to us, these are physically tied to our transit provider who is unwilling to route these elsewhere. Due to this we now have some new IP ranges especially allocated to us by RIPE and these are a permanent assignment direct to ourselves and not tied to any particular provider, therefore ensuring no such disruption at all in the future and also allowing us to bring in additional transit from any provider we wish with no further changes or disruption required. As we hope you can appreciate, this is a move that will offer far better value, stability and also future proofs our network as we expand further. The implications of this change are that you may find your website inaccessible for a short period of time once we actually perform the move. This however is due to your computer or ISP caching the old DNS details, not an actual prolonged outage of your website, however this will resolve itself shortly with no intervention required by yourself. We are estimating the actual downtime to sites to be in the region of 15-30 minutes max whilst the IP addresses on the servers are updated.
The only situation where changes will be required are where you are running your DNS from an external location and manually pointing any DNS records back to our servers IP address(s). In this case, you can either move the domain over to our nameservers beforehand or otherwise you will just need to update the IP address(s) in your DNS to point to the new location after the move when advised.
We will be providing full details of the work on our forum as the upgrades are performed.
One of the first changes that we will be making is a change to our current power and network transit provider. Our current supplier is not offering us the flexibility that we require and also we have seen a 50% rise in our costs from them over the last year over two price rises from them, mainly however due to the well known increases in electricity prices. This has meant quite a difference in our operating costs, yet we have successfully managed not to pass these costs on to our customers. The upgrades that we are performing now will not only mean that we can ensure that our prices continue to remain as low as they are now, but there is also the possibility of even more features or higher account limits offered in the future.
The change in our transit provider will however mean that all of our IP addresses will change. Whilst we do have our own range of IP addresses currently assigned to us, these are physically tied to our transit provider who is unwilling to route these elsewhere. Due to this we now have some new IP ranges especially allocated to us by RIPE and these are a permanent assignment direct to ourselves and not tied to any particular provider, therefore ensuring no such disruption at all in the future and also allowing us to bring in additional transit from any provider we wish with no further changes or disruption required. As we hope you can appreciate, this is a move that will offer far better value, stability and also future proofs our network as we expand further. The implications of this change are that you may find your website inaccessible for a short period of time once we actually perform the move. This however is due to your computer or ISP caching the old DNS details, not an actual prolonged outage of your website, however this will resolve itself shortly with no intervention required by yourself. We are estimating the actual downtime to sites to be in the region of 15-30 minutes max whilst the IP addresses on the servers are updated.
The only situation where changes will be required are where you are running your DNS from an external location and manually pointing any DNS records back to our servers IP address(s). In this case, you can either move the domain over to our nameservers beforehand or otherwise you will just need to update the IP address(s) in your DNS to point to the new location after the move when advised.
We will be providing full details of the work on our forum as the upgrades are performed.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
