http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:14:08 CDT http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=7 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 CDT SERVICE UPDATE   The following Service Update has been sent to all our Clients by email. If you did not receive this email, please ensure that you have an active email address registered with us. You can even add an extra email address, if you have one that you use more frequently than the one in your profile - adding an extra email address means that you will get a copy of our emails to both email addresses. If your email address is not up-to-date, you may not receive important up-dates regarding your hosting service. We are currently in the process of expanding our business and the first stage of this involves us moving both the D9hosting.com and the D9hosting.co.uk domain names to a central location from the current registrar. This move will give us room for future expansion that would not be possible with our current set-up. During this registrar change there shouldn't be any downtime (famous last words!), but we have decided to make all our Clients aware of this, just to be on the safe side. The process was started today, but it could take anywhere from 2 to 20 days to complete - it's really all down to how fast our old provider processes everything. If there is any downtime, this will simply be propagation from the old registrar to the new, so it shouldn't affect you for more than a few hours, if at all. (Depending on your Internet Service Provider) This is the first part of an upgrade process that we have planned for the Summer of 2008. As always, we will keep you informed of what we are doing. We will send another email to let you know when the registrar change has been completed. Many Thanks For Your Continued Support Kind Regards, Paula & Dan http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=6 Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT As I'm sure you have already noticed there was quite a long outage that affected all sites hosted on D9. In short this was down to a massive storm that swept across the Atlanta area last night, a lightning strike hit the datacentre causing a power outage that brought down all servers, including good 'ol Bullseye! (The server that your site his hosted on) After a long wait the server has now finished the file check and we are able to bring everyone back online. Here's a more detailed explanation of what happened, as provided by our datacentre: --Start Datacentre Statement-- "Severe storm cells came through North Georgia Region this evening. AtlantaNAP experienced an over current fault outage on one of our 2 main feeds. The feed is the original feed that has the most load currently connected to it. The amount of systems connected to the load is the amount of lightning and over current that will try to be passed to the system – i.e. if you don’t have very much load on it - like our new feed is currently only at 1/6th load - then current does not try to flow to it very much. Our first system is currently at 65% load so it tried to absorb much more of the lightning strike than the other one and hence the main breaker going into over current fault. I have spoken with all of our key electrical engineers associated with the building at this point. According to Georgia power / our PSSI and Cummins engineers – we likely took a lightning strike to the utility very near the facility which caused an over current fault on our main incoming breaker on our first set of switchgear. The breaker is designed to trip in the event of this kind of fault to protect the gear (your computers) inside the building from being burned up by the lightning strike. When this type of fault happens - the computer that is the brains of the swithgear will not start the generators until an engineer verifies where the fault is. This is because a fault inside the wiring plant could also cause this kind of over current in the event of a main short if a feeder wire of main current in the building were to become damaged. In that case it would be very dangerous to turn the power back on manually or to force a manual start of the gen sets and push current to the system with a fault remaining. Lives and machinery could be lost. We dispatched several of our staff visually to inspect for faults – (we did not want to turn something on and have it fry everyone’s gear) and found none and verified it was likely a lightning strike and manually started the generators to restore power. Unfortunately the ups system is only designed to carry that load for 10 minutes which was not enough time for us to safely verify and do a manual start. This is apparently a rare event – to get a direct utility strike like this – that close that does not get dissipated before it hits us. The farther away from your site the strike occurs - the more other load and grounds it has to dissipate before it gets to you. The good news is we did not burn up any equipment. Some of you did not lose power because you were connected to the other lightly loaded feed coming in and it was not enough load source to overwhelm the breaker since it is only 18% loaded at this point. Some of you lost network connectivity because downstream feeder switches that your computers are connected to are only single power supply units. We are in the process of examining a facility wide network upgrade that will move to a newer chassis based solution throughout the facility - we started looking at this as a way to offer new services capability that many f you have been asking for - it is a costly upgrade and will bring redundancy but also brings some pitfalls as well since you have more connections into a single chassis. We are still looking at this currently and will keep you up to date as to the direction we decide to move. They have told me that under normal operating conditions there is really nothing we could have done and we should simply be glad we had good equipment installed that kept our computers from being fried. I am thankful that I am not looking at a lot of damaged equipment that could not simply be turned back on - that would be a disaster I do not want to deal with. At this point it seems like the new switchgear with over current protection was a good investment." --End Datacentre Statement-- Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this outage has caused. Unfortunately there's not much you can do to protect yourself from freak events like this! As stated, all sites should now be back up and running as normal. If you do find any errors with any of your sites, please don't hesitate to open a support ticket and we will be happy to help you. Thanks for reading, and again please accept our apologies. Regards, D9 Hosting http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=5 Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 CST There is 15-25% packet loss to those users that are coming in on the Level3 Communications network. That's why pages are loading slowly for clients whose connections are coming through Level3 communications. Level3 Communications is a carrier in proxy between the datacentre and your ISP's, meaning it is not an issue of the datacenter, and not your ISP's so there is little we can do about it right now except wait for Level3 to address the packet loss. http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=4 Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:00:00 CST IMPORTANT - D9 Hosting Seasonal Annoucement   When Dan and I first started D9 Hosting, just a few short months ago, we never dreamed how successful D9 would become and how much we would both enjoy working to create the best service we could possibly offer for our fellow Internet Marketers. We would both like to sincerely thank you for your kind custom and for your support during 2007. We consider ourselves extremely fortunate that we have the best Clients that we could possibly hope for. During the Christmas period we are both committed to providing you with the best service possible without having to outsource our support desk. We know you are aware that we like to be very `hands-on', and we know you appreciate a personalised service from us both - this is something we strive to maintain. Whilst we both agreed from the very beginning that we wanted to provide a personalised, professional service to our valued Clients at all times, like you, we want to spend time with our family and friends over the Christmas holiday. We would like you to know that we will be monitoring our support desk on a `skeleton' basis during this holiday period and would like you to be assured that if your problem is totally urgent we will endeavour to do our best to solve your problems in a timely manner. We respectfully ask you to be patient during this holiday period and only submit a support ticket if it is absolutely urgent to your business needs and, of course, we will do our very best to provide you with the excellent support we strive to maintain during the rest of the year. May we take this opportunity of wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year Seasonal Best Wishes from Paula Brett & Dan Thompson D9 Hosting http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=3 Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:00:00 CST 9th December, 2007 If you are receiving emails saying your account has been cancelled, please disregard these. Because we have changed to a new billing system, and we are in the process of turning the old one off,  there is some bouncing back of IPN (instant payment notifications) with PayPal because we cancelled your subscriptions. Please bear with us - we are confidence this will settle down fairly quickly. Many thanks indeed for your patience. Paula Brett & Dan Thompson http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=1 Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 CST 8th December, 2007 If you set up a PayPal subscription when you originally opened your D9 Hosting account, you will have received an email today informing you that your subscription has been cancelled. The reason for this is because not only have we updated our website and customer area, we have also updated our billing system. Therefore, all PayPal subscriptions originally created will not work with our new billing sytem. Your account is still in good standing, however, it has not been cancelled or suspended. Additionally, you will, of course, receive a reminder from us when your hosting package or domain name is due for renewal. If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to submit a ticket to us. Paula Brett & Dan Thompson D9 Hosting http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/support.php     http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/clients/announcements.php?id=2 Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 CST 8th December, 2007 To ensure that all important messages from D9 reach you, please make sure that you keep your contact email address up-to-date at all times. Paula Brett & Dan Thompson http://www.d9hosting.co.uk/support.php