Scheduled Maintenance on mail servers on Saturday and Sunday, 07/16 - 07/17, 9PM ET

[FH-Dave]

This email has been sent to all shared hosting customers.


Dear Valued Customers,

We would like to schedule a maintenance work on our mail servers, mail1.fluidhosting.com (66.150.201.101) and mail2.fluidhosting.com (66.150.201.102). During this maintenance window, we will migrate both mail servers from our Internap Boston data center to our Equinix Secaucus data center. Below are the schedule:

1. mail1.fluidhosting.com will be migrated to its new home on Saturday, 07/16/2005 at around 9:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT -04:00).

2. mail2.fluidhosting.com will be migrated to is new home on Sunday, 07/17/2005 at around 9:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT -04:00).

- At around 2 PM on the day of the migration, we will start syncing the old and new mail servers. This will copy all of your mailboxes on the old mail server to the new. This initial sync may take up to ~6 hours as all mailboxes and all emails will be copied from the old to the new mail servers. Mail services will still be running during this time.

- Later, at 9 PM we will stop the mail service and then do one last sync between old and mail servers. The last sync will be short as it will only copy new emails that may be received int he old mail server since the initial sync.

- Once the final sync is finished, we will update the DNS record for the new mail servers.

- During DNS propagation, it is important that customers can still check and send emails. Emails received on the old mail server will be delivered to your mailboxes on the new mail server. And during the DNS propagation, SMTP service on both the old and new mail servers will still be running to mail deliveries on both mail servers.

- Once the DNS propagation has been completed, we will stop the mail service on the old mail servers. If you are using third party DNS servers, please make sure that the mail servers IP are updated. The new mail1.fluidhosting.com mail server will have an IP of 204.14.90.61 and the new mail2.fluidhosting.com mail server will have an IP of 204.14.90.62. If you use our DNS (ns1.fluidhosting.com, ns2.fluidhosting.com, and ns3.fluidhosting.com) then the change of IP will be seamless to you.

- Because of the nature of the mail servers synchronizations, if you use POP3 to check your emails, you may see duplicate emails on your local inbox as your email client may be downloading emails on both new and old mail servers. IMAP users should not be affected.

Although we believe the interruption on the mail service can be made to under 30 minutes, please allow up to two hours for mail service outage. During this period, none of your emails will be lost since MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) are designed to always make delivery attempts if the destination mail server can not be contacted.

Please note again that the migration on mail1.fluidhosting.com and mail2.fluidhosting.com will be performed on separate days, Saturday for mail1 and Sunday for mail2.

Should you have any questions and/or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@fluidhosting.com.

Sincerely,
Administrators
Fluid Hosting, LLC

[FH-Dave]

As scheduled, the migration is taking place now. I have created a new thread at http://forums.fluidhosting.com/showthread.php?p=12824#post12824 for anybody to discuss about/keep track on the migration process.

3:00 PM Eastern Time: started initial sync between old mail server and new mail server. This will take up to 6 hours.

7:00 PM: initial sync between old mail server and new mail server is done.

8:00 PM: updated control panel database for new mail servers

9:00 PM: mail service on old mail1.fluidhosting.com has been stopped. Doing last synchornization.

9:15 PM: final synch between old and new mail1.fluidhosting.com servers is completed.

9:20 PM: mail services on old mail1.fluidhosting.com is restarted. Mail deliveries are being forwarded to new mail1.fluidhosting.com. Customers should be able to check emails.

[FH-Dave]

9:25 PM: mail1.fluidhosting.com migration is done. Doing some final configuration tweaks. Please check your email functionality.

[FH-John]

I've begun migration of mail2.

[FH-John]

Migration of mail2 looks good. We're doing some final tests, etc. At the moment, the new server is working to catch up on the mail queue, thus mail delivery times are delayed a bit.

[FH-Dave]

Migrations are completed. Mail1 and Mail2 are now on new servers in our Equinix data center. The migration have gone well, as planned, and better than expected. No serious problems have been encountered.

If you encounter any problem/glitch with the new mail server, feel free to email us at support[at]fluidhosting.com immediately.

Thank you, and enjoy the new mail servers on its shinning brand new IP block :)

[FH-Dave]

The following email has been sent to all shared hosting customers.


Note: Please do not reply to this email directly as your email may not be attended to. But instead, please contact us at support[at]fluidhosting.com.

Dear Valued Customer,

This is an update to the scheduled maintenance work on mail servers, performed on Saturday (for mail1.fluidhosting.com) and Sunday (for mail2.fluidhosting.com). The migrations have been completed as scheduled.

We are happy to inform you that the migrations have been completed smoothly without any unexpected problem/complication. Total downtime on each mail server is less than anticipated, just around 20 minutes on each mail server. The new mail servers are looking healthy and performing optimally.

There might still be glitches here and there. Should you encounter any problem, glitch, and unusual experience with the new mail servers, please inform us by opening a ticket to support[at]fluidhosting.com. We will attend to this problem as soon as possible.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,
Administrators
Fluid Hosting, LLC