Category: Information

[Upcoming] 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.

Price list adjustments as of 1 June

Unfortunately effective 1 June 2023 we are having to make a few adjustments to our price list to reflect the current exchange rates, energy markets and incessant price increases we have had to absorb from almost all of our suppliers.

We made very incremental changes to our pricing effective 1 January. Unfortunately our costs have continued to increase dramatically since then.

As of 1 June we will be applying a 5% price increase across all of our products and services. For a copy of our full price list please use the “Download our price list” button on our What We Offer page.

Updated prices will be reflected on your invoice from 1 June onward. Customers with fixed price contracts will be adjusted on the contract renewal date. If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact Chris Wik.

[Scheduled] PHP upgrades for all Web Hosting customers

As part of our proactive managed service we are working on upgrading PHP for all Web Hosting customers who are still using the 7.X branches which are end of life and no longer supported.

Customers with managed servers will be contacted on an individual basis regarding these upgrades.

Customers using our Web Hosting account plans on our shared DirectAdmin servers will be upgraded to PHP 8 automatically starting from 22 February. PHP 8 maintains good backwards compatibility with 7.X but there are a few backward incompatible changes so there is a small chance that some sites or specific functions within your site may not run properly under PHP 8. In most instances our monitoring servers will detect this automatically. Any site returning a 500 Internal Server Error response will be flagged up by our monitoring system. If your site is flagged up we will investigate whether the site can be easily upgraded to support PHP 8. If it is not possible to run on PHP 8 without extensive modification we will revert to PHP 7.X and contact you to discuss options.

If you have any questions or concerns, or discover any functionality in your site which does not work on PHP 8, please contact us for assistance.