Emergency Maintenance Work: 6am on Sunday 22nd January 2012

21st January 2012

A hard disk drive malfunction in our primary web and email server has been identified, and is scheduled for replacement at 6am GMT on Sunday 22nd January 2012. It is expected that the server will be powered down for between 15 and 30 minutes shortly after this time.

During this period, most customer websites and email accounts will be unavailable. Virtual Server customers will not be affected.

Because a mirroring arrangement is in place, the faulty hard disk drive should not cause overall failure of the server unless the secondary hard disk drive also fails. Whilst this scenario is extremely unlikely, services should be considered "at risk" until the faulty hard disk drive has been replaced, and customers should avoid any mission-critical activity during this time.

Hiltonian Media apologises for any inconvenience this may cause, and the short notice provided. However, we hope you will appreciate that this hardware failure must be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The scheduled time of the work has been selected to minimise any potential disruption.

To keep updated of emergency maintenance and other news you can follow us on Twitter @HiltonianMedia.

UPDATE (22/01/12 at 7.30am):

The faulty disk has been replaced and the server has started correctly. Once we have verified that everything is working as expected, the new disk will be re-synced with the master. 

UPDATE (22/01/12 at 8am):

The server is working as expected and the new disk is being re-synced with the master. This will cause a degradation in performance for 1 to 2 hours.

UPDATE (23/01/12):

The emergency maintenance work was completed successfully yesterday morning, and services are no longer "at risk". Thank you for your patience and co-operation.