As previously announced, tonight we are making some important changes to our web hosting service.  At 10pm tonight, we are replacing our existing FreeBSD servers running PHP 4.3 with new CentOS servers running PHP 4.4.  There will be a short outage (no more than a few minutes) whilst we make the changeover.

What You Need To Do

Whilst we expect the majority of web sites to continue working without any issues, it is important, because of the software changes, that you test your website as soon as possible to see if there are any problems that need to be addressed. Apart from ensuring compatibility, you do not need to make any changes to your site or DNS.

Please raise any faults with our new cluster to our Customer Services team.

If you’d like to know more about the new cluster, please click the link below.

Technical Details

At 10pm tonight, we are moving the following IP addresses from our existing FreeBSD web hosting cluster, and binding them to our new CentOS 5.2 cluster:

• 193.111.200.150
• 193.111.200.151

The new cluster offers the following technical features:

• CentOS 5.2
• Apache 2.2.9 + mpm-itk
• mod_php 4.4.9
• Perl 5.8.8 via CGI
• mod_perl 2.0.4
• Python 2.4.3 via CG

… all running on (currently) four virtual machines under VMWare ESX.

The new cluster sits behind a pair of load balancers, and a pair of reverse proxies running Squid.  The Squid proxy is non-caching (although we can enable caching for an individual website on request), and it allows us to direct individual websites to any of our web hosting clusters without any DNS changes.

The FreeBSD servers are being decommissioned in December, and will be making way for more VMWare ESX host servers as we continue to grow next year.