Author: Ashley Lipscombe

[Complete] ams2-c7-1 upgrade

This is an upcoming maintenance announcement for any customer who has a website hosted on our ams2-c7-1 Direct Admin shared hosting server.

Unfortunately, the CentOS 7 operating system powering this server is end of life so we must upgrade it to continue to offer a secure and stable hosting environment.

We have provisioned a new server to replace it, ams1-r9-1 running Rocky Linux 9 and we will be migrating all accounts and the server’s IP address to it.

All accounts running any version of PHP 7 will be forced on to a new minimum of PHP 7.4 and MariaDB 10.4 will be replaced with MySQL 8.0. We estimate that 99% of sites will run without any problems on this new environment but are aware that a handful may not.

We hope to be able to shut down ams2-c7-1 completely but in the event that any sites have any significant hurdles, ams2-c7-1 could be kept up with a LAN IP only and restricted access FTP server for clients to access via VPN for these specific sites to continue operating.

We will need to shut down ams2-c7-1 for the whole maintenance period. As sites are migrated one by one to ams1-r9-1 by the Direct Admin backup/restore tool as part of a batch scheduled job they will come back online as the IP address will already be ready and waiting on ams1-r9-1. It is hard to predict exactly how long this will take but we expect it to complete within 4-8 hours.

We will be heavily monitoring site HTTP responses, error logs and support tickets for any signs of problems and proactively intervening with problematic sites, starting with basic troubleshooting and we will reach out to you if required. We will be conducting manual tests against samples of sites running various software platforms and PHP versions. Please if you have any issues with your site when it comes back online, contact us by emailing support@anu.net to discuss your options with us.

Date of maintenance: 2nd February 2025
Maintenance start: 10 AM (10:00) UK time
Maintenance end: 6 PM (18:00) UK time latest, depending on restore times.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 10:10AM UK: This work has now started. ams2-c7-1 will be offline shortly and we will provide an update on this work in a couple of hours.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 1PM UK: This planned work is going well and according to schedule. The first batch of sites are already back online and we expect to see more sites coming back up soon.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 4:15PM UK: All sites except a handful are back online. We are continuing to work on these sites and will provide another status update soon.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 4:40PM: All sites are now back online so this maintenance is now complete. If you still have any issues with your specific site, please do get in touch and we’d be happy to help.

[Complete] SpamTitan upgrade

We will be upgrading SpamTitan to the latest version.

As this is a major version change it requires us to set up a new instance of SpamTitan and switch over to it.

We will performance this maintenance at 11PM on Saturday, 1st July 2023 and it is expected to be completed by 1AM on Sunday, 2nd July 2023. There may be up to 60 minutes of downtime during this window.

Any quarantined emails will remain on the old SpamTitan instance for 14 days after the upgrade which is our standard deletion period. If you need to release anything from this old server at any time during the 14 days, please contact us at support@anu.net and we will be happy to help you. All new quarantined emails can be released as normal via the SpamTitan interface or quarantine summary emails.

If you have any concerns or questions do not hesitate to contact us by email on support@anu.net.

Update 1st July 2023 @ 11PM: This work is now in progress.

Update 1st July 2023 @ 11:55PM: This work is now complete. Please see advice above re releasing emails from the quarantine over the past 14 days that are not available on the new SpamTitan instance. If you have any issues at all do not hesitate to contact support@anu.net or if your emails are affected and you can’t do that, you can open a live chat at https://anu.net to reach us.

[Complete] ams2-c6-1 changes

This is an announcement for any customer who has a website or email service running on ams2-c6-1. Unfortunately, the operating system running on ams2-c6-1 is end of life and needs replacing.

On 1st of May 2023 we will be transferring all hosting accounts from ams2-c6-1 to a newer web server, ams1-c8-1. This will include email and DNS data but not web data – this will remain on ams2-c6-1 via a secure local proxy. You won’t need to do anything. We will automatically be handling the transfer and after the maintenance everything including your email accounts will operate as normal.

Customers who wish to access their website files and data directly via FTP / MySQL on ams2-c6-1 will need to be connected to our VPN and access it via the local network – please contact support@anu.net if you either do not have a VPN account and need one, or are not sure how to connect to ams2-c6-1 using it.

We expect this maintenance to begin at 8PM Amsterdam Time and be complete 2AM Amsterdam time (6 hours). During this period, email accounts hosted on ams2-c6-1 will be offline throughout, and web/DNS traffic may experience 2-3 outages of up to 15 minutes each.

This only affects clients with websites and email hosted on ams2-c6-1 – we will also be contacting customers directly if this is the case.

Ashley