Brief scheduled maintenance for MySQL update March 9, 2012 (completed)
Between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Pacific time on Friday March 9, 2012, we’ll be updating the MySQL database software on all our hosting servers. This will cause a Web site service interruption of about 30 seconds for some customers at some time during this period. E-mail will not be affected.
This maintenance is necessary to install a mandatory MySQL security update that will upgrade the MySQL version to 5.1.61. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.
Update 10:13 PM: The maintenance was completed with less than 30 seconds downtime on each server. Customers should not notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or problems.
on Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 7:02 pm (Pacific) Meg Geddes wrote:
Are we getting a credit for this downtime?
on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 12:22 pm (Pacific) Santam Chakraborty wrote:
Neither my website nor the account page at Tigertech are available. This started just 5 minutes ago. Is there any scheduled maintainence that is going on?
on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 1:00 pm (Pacific) Ken wrote:
No, we aren’t doing any maintenance. Our servers are running fine — your site is accessible, as is ours. You can verify this with third-party sites such as: http://checksite.us/?url=isocenter.org
You must be having some temporary routing problems with your ISP (or somewhere else on the Internet between you and our servers). Hopefully it’ll clear up soon by itself. If not, you can run the command “traceroute isocenter.org” (or “tracert isocenter.org” if you are using Windows) to see exactly where the problem is. You can then contact your ISP and let them know to fix the problem (if it’s their problem).
We’re sorry that you’re having temporary trouble, but this sort of thing happens occasionally on the Internet as minor mistakes are made somewhere else in the world.
on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 9:09 pm (Pacific) Santam Chakraborty wrote:
Thanks It turned out to be an ISP related problem after all. Awesome support
on Friday, March 23, 2012 at 4:11 pm (Pacific) Robert Mathews wrote:
Meg Geddes wrote:
>Are we getting a credit for this downtime?
Well, like all hosting companies, we don’t usually give credits for scheduled maintenance, especially when it’s outside of our control (the MySQL authors forced this mandatory security upgrade on all users, and there’s no way to complete such an upgrade without a few seconds downtime).
It’s also not quite clear what such a credit would be — we need to do brief scheduled maintenance several times a year (again, like all hosting companies), and it wouldn’t make business sense to give customers a whole month’s credit each time. But I’m pretty sure you’re not just asking for a prorated credit for 30 seconds’ worth of service, either, since that calculates out to about $0.00008!
If you have concerns about this, please do contact us. But generally, all we can really say is that we factor this kind of scheduled maintenance into our 99.9% uptime guarantee, and we exceed the 99.9% by a fair bit most months — for example, about 26 seconds of maintenance downtime, as in this case, is still 99.999% uptime for a month. So it’s usually treated as meeting our published service level. I should emphasize that we try hard to avoid any downtime, and that we’d consider it a very bad month if we met only the 99.9% mark…
(By the way, please accept our apologies for the delayed reply to your comment: Akismet had flagged it as spam for some bizarre reason, and we found it when trawling through our comment spam queue. We’ve disabled Akismet as a result, because our simple “type 5678” check eliminates all automated blog spam anyway.)