The “farnsworth” and “lrrr” Web hosting servers will be restarted at approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Saturday October 13, and customer Web sites on those two servers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. (See “Which server is my account on?” if you aren’t sure.) E-mail service, and customers on all other Web servers, will not be affected at all.
The restart is necessary so we can increase the memory (RAM) on those two servers to 4 GB, as we described here. After this, all our hosting servers will have 4 GB of memory.
By comparison with many other reasonably priced hosting companies, we keep the load on our servers pretty low to start with, so 4 GB is “overkill” probably 99.99% of the time — but we want to cover the other .01%. (Our unofficial motto should probably be something like “Tiger Technologies: We’re paranoid so you don’t have to be.”)
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Update: Note that the maintenance time has been changed from 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday August 11, all Tiger Technologies Web hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites, as well as the Tiger Technologies Web site, will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. E-mail service will not be affected.
This brief maintenance is necessary for two reasons. First, we’re upgrading the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. Secondly, we’re adding more memory to our hosting servers, so that each server will have 4 GB of RAM instead of the current 2 GB.
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We’ve finished upgrading all our Web hosting servers to use MySQL 5.0.32, as we explained in this earlier post. The total time that MySQL databases were unavailable averaged about ten minutes per server. Again, we regret any downtime — this was unavoidable for such a major upgrade.
You should not notice any difference in how your site operates. In the unlikely event you have any problems, please contact us by opening a ticket so we can help.
This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
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Tonight at 11 PM Pacific time (2 AM Eastern time May 10) we’ll be performing brief scheduled maintenance on our mail servers. (We’ll be adding more RAM and adding more disk space to make sure that our mail servers continue to keep up with the growth in our service.) This requires restarting, which takes about five minutes, so you will see a brief period of about five minutes where you are unable to connect to our mail servers. No mail will be lost, of course; it will be queued and available after the maintenance.
We apologize for the inconvenience this causes. We schedule this kind of maintenance for late Saturday night/early Sunday morning (the least busy time of the week) to minimize the impact.
The “farnsworth” Web server locked up and needed restarting again last night at about 9:04 PM Pacific time, causing another short outage for some customers. (A similar problem happened Monday night.) To make sure this doesn’t happen again, we’ll be replacing the entire server (switching it with a spare server) at about 11 PM (Pacific) tonight, which will result in about 5 minutes of downtime.
We’re also taking this opportunity to upgrade the hardware on one of our mail servers to allow for future growth; customers (even those with accounts on other Web servers besides the farnsworth server) may see a short (approximately 5 minute) interruption in their ability to retrieve e-mail between 11 PM and midnight.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes — as always, we’re committed to the highest possible levels of reliability.
