One of our shared windows servers - Palamedes - 81.17.248.55 has been rebooted now as some emergency Windows updates had to be applied to the server and a reboot for these to take effect.
The server should be back up fully in the next 20-30 minutes at the most, however the downtime may be less than this depending on how quickly the server can restart.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you or your customers
A few people have told us that over the past while they've noticed the new store can be a bit slow at times. There are two parts to the current store, the part on blacknight.com that allows to you choose to build a package and the bit that handles domain registrations, account creation and the checkout process (the part where we take your money, which is very important).
Since the entire platform is virtualised we've got the ability to tweak access to the underlying hardware for each part of the platform.
Today we've done the following:
1) We've given store.blacknight.com more access to the Intel multi-core CPUs on the hardware nodes that it runs across.
2) We've given bm.blacknight.com access to all cores on the nodes that it runs across as the store makes xmlrpc calls to bm and bm processes around 20k tasks a day (domain lookups, billing customers, creating accounts, sending provisioning commands to the provisioning system, checking on transfers, registrations etc etc).
3) We've re-written both the vps and shared hosting shops so that they now cache the plans instead of hitting the XMLrpcd on each customer view. The shared hosting one is live and the VPS one will go live in the coming week.
The changes above should make your experience with us more pleasant and also cause less frustration. We can also re-look at the allocation of cores at a later date to better tweak both systems.
On Saturday November 1st from approximately 8am until approx midday we will not be able to process any orders or updates for the following domain name extensions:
com
net
org
info
biz
mobi
name
me
Active domains will not be affected during the maintenance window.
This maintenance window is being conducted by the ICANN accredited registrar we use (eNom) and will have no impact on .ie, co.uk or .eu domain orders.
Hosting and other services are not impacted.
Currently this server is down, we're working with our data centre partners to get it back. We estimate that it'll be fully functioning within 30 minutes providing there is no critical hardware issues which we've not yet determined.
Further updates will be posted here once we've been notified of the status of the machine once the on-site engineer comes back to us.
Update: 10:15
This server is now running 100% again, we're monitoring it closely and trying to identify the issue behind the outage. There will be no further updates to this post.
Today we're upgrading our billing system to version 4.3.4 of Parallels Business Automation. This will happen at 10:30am today Tuesday 7th of October.
Your billing panel, our store and other services will be intermittently affected during this software upgrade.
No critical customer services will be affected by this.
Sorry for the short notice on this, but it was planned for today however it contains some critical fixes for our software that need to be applied.
The shared windows server - Palamedes 81.17.248.55 is having technical issues at the moment. The server has been rebooted fully and is in the process of restarting right now. Our engineers hope to have the machine fully back up in 20 - 30 minutes provided there are no hardware related problems.
This will affect all websites on this server, however any email traffic will remain completely un-effected.
We do apologise for any inconvenience this might be causing you or your customers.
Update 17:50: The server has been back up for some time now and our engineers can now confirm that everything is fine with the server and it is fully functioning again.