Dear customer,
As anyone with services in our Secondary POP in Manchester will know, we have been experiencing more than our fair share of network stability issues in recent months. This affects anyone on the IP ranges 89.238.174.* and 194.79.29.* - Your IP can be checked by pinging your domain at http://just-ping.com
Whilst things were at least been stable over Christmas, our confidence in our providers ability to supply us with a reliable service and more importantly, communicate with us in times of crisis has been damaged beyond repair and consequently we have been planning a way forward.
After very careful consideration, we have decided we can no longer work with our Manchester provider and intend to relocate all equipment currently residing within our Manchester POP to a new facility in Maidstone, Kent.
There are a number of positive factors which have contributed to this decision and these are as follows:
1.) We have already established a mutually positive working relationship directly with the new facility owners. This is something that we do not have with our current provider, which has ultimately resulted in our business not being appreciated as well as the poor level of customer service we have recently received.
2.) The new facility has a far larger supply of power from the national grid as well as associated cooling available to it, meaning that we will be able to exceed our current maximum of 16A per rack footprint - technically up to 64A!
3.) For the vast majority of users, latency and routing will improve as the new facility is closer to London (within 1ms vs the 7ms currently) and despite this, also maintains diverse connectivity that does not go via Docklands in the event of a disaster.
4.) Probably most importantly, we will be taking greater control of our own network and will be deploying much more powerful Juniper based core networking equipment backed by an around the clock management package with Juniper themselves.
As with any change of this kind, there will be some negative factors but we are doing everything within our power and at great expense to minimise the impact this has on our clients:
1.) There will need to be a notable period of out-of-hours downtime to move our racks of equipment from Manchester to the new facility in Maidstone via a specialist relocation company, we estimate in the region of 8-12hrs at this early stage.
2.) During the time surrounding the move our staff will all be onsite assisting in the re-cabling and logging process and thus general support response times will initially be slower.
3.) Due to the closer proximity to London and the higher spec of the new facility, our cost pricing will rise but we intend to absorb these fully and will not be increasing our prices to clients.
4.) Any IP addresses on these servers will change.
We do not have any confirmed dates at present but our proposed date/times (subject to approval by both facilities and the relocation company) is Friday 27th Jan @ 22:00 GMT through to early/mid morning on Saturday 28th Jan.
As the migration does involve IP address changes we will be notifying all clients of their new IP after the migration. Anyone on a shared or reseller package will not need to make any changes however VPS clients will need to change their nameserver IPs.
To make the migration smoother for managed VPS clients and to minimise downtime we can setup a free cPanel DNS only server on a server not being moved. This can then be clustered with your existing server and nameserver IPs changed. When the servers are migrated we will then cluster the DNS only server again and update IPs. This will save you needing to update your nameservers immediately after migration. To have this setup please submit a support ticket.
Needless to say, we will of course keep everyone in the loop when details are confirmed and we welcome our clients to get in touch with us with any concerns they may have.
Regards
Martfox Internet Services
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Powered by WHMCompleteSolution