As our regular readers know we have a number of different hosting companies in different countries. On Friday we had a major system failure with one of our UK servers. This caused the sites on there to be intermittent as was the email and for about 2 hours the whole server was off line.

This was our new UK server which had the problem. This was a caused by a change to the backup routine being set to daily in full and somewhere in the changes the backup routine started hoggin all the system resources and causing downtime. The engineers had difficulty accessing the systems and had to get the datacenter to effectively unplug the server to restart it. There was then some data errors on the drive which were repaired and about 19:00 hours it was back online with no data loss.

We have spoken to our hosting provider as we do not want a repeat. They tell us when this server was set up the same format and configuration was used that thehave used for years on their other servers, which include 1 in the USA which we use. The problem stems from an attempt to backup using a cron job in full and daily. They have now reverted to independant full backups and spaced our incremental backups which works well on all the other servers.

We feel happy with the response and having used this company for some time are therefore satisfied. However we will closely monitor the server and will move in the event of any other problems. We have plenty of capacity on other servers if we have to and have our own backups.

Additionally we use independant companies for our registry needs and therefore can easily change the nameservers and transfer clients hosting EVEN if the server fails. Indeed we did this before for a client who was hosted elsewhere and had server issues.

 We apologies to any client or user if this caused any inconvenience in any way.