NOTE: This does not affect Dedicated Server clients.

We will be moving to a major upgrade of our HSphere system this weekend. Our planned maintenance window will be 10PM-4AM Pacific/California Time. If everything works well, you probably won’t notice more than 30 minutes of down-time but we have a large window just in case.

Please make any backups of your sites and databases in the next few days.

Your server will not be down the entire time but we have to update quite a few servers so there’s a good chance you will experience some intermittent connectivity issues.

For sure, these servers will be down for 30 minutes:

1) All mySQL clusters. If you use any of the mysqlxxx.imountain.com clusters, you will experience 30 minutes of down-time for the upgrade somewhere between 10PM and 4AM.

2) The cp.imountain.com Control panel server will be down for 30 minutes.

3) Mail clusters should be down about 15 minutes each.

4) Webservers will probably NOT be down. We will not be updating the webservers (most likely).

Changes you will notice after the updates:

1) HSphere Control panel skin will look different; however, the old skin is still selectable if you prefer. The new control Panel looks more like “Plesk” or “HSPComplete” if you’re familiar with those.

2) Apache 2.2 will be available on a separate server which you can move to if you wish. Apache 2.2 will be our standard webserver offering moving forward.

3) Ruby on Rails support will also be available on the Apache 2.2 servers.

4) The mySQL clusters will be fully replicated and backed up with a live backup server: 1 replication cluster + 1 backup server with data 3 hours behind. This is probably one of the most fault-tolerant mySQL solutions you can find in a public hosting environment.

5) We will be changing our naming and our logos from “Iron Mountain Hosting” to “iMountain.com”. This is a rebranding of our services, so we’ll just be known from our domain name “iMountain”.

6) Major updates to all the EasyApp packages to upgrade to the latest and greatest versions like Joomla 1.5.2, phpBB3, WordPress 2.5, etc.

That’s all for now, please make sure you run your backups just in case. We’ve been testing the installation for a few months now and things look to be running fine.

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday and as always, it’s a pleasure serving you.

iMountain.com

Yes, we know it sounds strange but we believe in giving our servers some time off now and then. Sure, it affects our customers and takes 30-40 minutes out of their webhosting time. And it sure makes its impossible to get that 100% up-time we’re always trying to achieve.

However, we firmly believe that regular maintenance down-time is essential to keep our servers running at optimum efficiency. These 40 minutes of downtime will result in a few straight months of trouble-free run-time. By taking down all our servers, we get free reign to open them up, have a look inside and make sure everything is working at peak performance. This includes fan-checks, power supply checks and maybe a few good shots of compressed air.

We appreciate your cooperation and patience during our down-time and want to assure you we try our best to keep these down-times to a minimum.