Scheduled Maintenance on Web Servers. Wednesday, 10/13/2004 10:30-11:30 PM ET

[allera]

The following notice was sent to all customers on 10/12/04:

Dear Customer,

We are scheduling a maintenance window on this coming Wednesday, 10/13/2004 at around 10:30-11:30 PM Eastern Time (GMT -04:00). During this maintenance window, we will upgrade PHP on all web servers from 4.3.8 to 4.3.9.

Any website using PHP will be affected. No other services will be affected during this maintenance window. We expect only a few minutes of downtime per web server. No complications are expected from this upgrade. We recommend reviewing the changelog for PHP 4.3.9 to ensure your scripts do not experience any problems after the upgrade. The changelog can be found here: http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.3.9 .

Should you have any questions and/or concerns regarding this scheduled maintenance, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@fluidhosting.com. Do not reply to this email directly.

Please plan for this maintenance window accordingly. Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,
Administrators
Fluid Hosting, LLC

The upgrade has been performed on all servers with each server having only a few seconds of downtime.

[KrisB]

In the future, would it be possible to schedule these periods of downtime for later in the evening? 10pm EST is equivalent to 7pm here on the West Coast -- not a particularly slow time for our clients.

Thanks,

-kb

[allera]

This particular update required extremely small downtime (server restart, which it does on its own several times a day). In the event of a problem, the older php library would have been brought back within seconds and the server restarted back to normal.

Normally, maintenance that requires extensive downtime to vital services (mail, web, sql, dns, etc) are done during off-hours (generally 2:00-3:00 am Eastern). You should be able to go back into our notices and find this to be accurate (to my knowledge).

Tonight's HSphere upgrade required only the control panel to be down, which inconvenienced our customers, but not their visitors/users. For that reason, 10:30pm EST was chosen as the start time.

If you have any further concerns, please do let us know!

[KrisB]

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your reply. I had only noticed that the new downtime scheduled events were much earlier than usual and this alarmed me.

It's good to hear that typical scheduled downtime will still happen in the wee-hours. :-)

Thanks,

-kb