We would like to inform you of some upcoming hosting account and server changes.
Servers
A number of our servers are running CentOS v7 as their operating system. Being an enterprise grade operating system, these typically have a 5 year support lifecycle from when they are released. Making a control panel compatible with the latest release means that there is generally around 4 years usability from an operating system release. CentOS v7 reaches end of extended support on June 30, 2024 and after this time there will not be any further security updates.
Whilst it is technically possible to upgrade CentOS v7 to the newer RockyLinux or AlmaLinux v8, this is a very risky process (at worst case it results in a server that will not boot) and also requires an outage of around 1-2 hours to complete. We take the opportunity instead to install new, higher specification server hardware and then migrate accounts over to these new servers. This removes the risk and allows us to move accounts in a controlled manner.
We have already moved a number of accounts onto our newer servers where this process can be completely automated, however for customers who are using their own nameservers, we will contact you with a date when the account is being moved as you will need to manually update your DNS.
The same will apply to dedicated server customers who are running an older operating system as you will need to upgrade/migrate to a newer supported operating system. We will contact all server customers separately to make arrangements.
Hosting Accounts
A number of minor changes are being made to our hosting accounts which may affect your package and/or billing.
We are retiring our legacy hosting packages. In 2018 we introduced a range of new hosting account packages for both shared and reseller accounts. The majority of customers with older accounts have upgraded to the new packages to gain the additional resources that they provide. The older accounts have not been increased in price and given the ongoing increasing costs for cPanel licencing, power, etc these packages are no longer going to be provided. We will migrate customers to the next nearest account package and you are free to upgrade/downgrade your package via our client area as you wish for your specific needs.
The packages affected are as follows:
Lite Hosting
Standard Hosting
Premium Hosting
Platinum Hosting
Reseller Budget
Reseller Lite
Reseller Standard
Reseller Premium
Reseller Platinum
Existing hosting accounts also currently receive a discount of 2 months when paying annually. This will be reduced to 1 month going forward in order to maintain the overall package prices and not increase the majority of hosting account prices. Unfortunately our cPanel licencing costs have more than doubled and we do not have the margins on accounts to not make changes to offset this.
CDP
For many years we have used the R1Soft CDP backup service to provide a very high additional level of data recovery for our hosting accounts. Whilst this provides backups as frequently as hourly, the software development in our opinion has been very lacking and has caused corruption of filesystems on a number of our servers in the past. Due to this, we have taken the decision to retire this software going forward. This software is not available on our servers that have newer operating systems and we will remove this from hosting accounts as the service comes up for renewal. We have been testing a number of other backup systems, one of which is Acronis which provides a similar level of backup snapshots and we hope to introduce this in the near future.
Should you have any questions regarding the above, please do let us know.
Saturday, January 20, 2024
