[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.