topic Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July in Community Announcements

Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

chrispurvey — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:54:34 GMT

This is an announcement about the recent migration of customers' webspace content from our legacy CGI web hosting platform to a new hosting environment managed via the Control Panel at hosting.plus.net
This notice does *not* apply to those using our 'Standard' Webspace/Homepages platform which is a completely separate service.
Information concerning the CGI migration can be found here -
http://community.plus.net/hosting-faqs/
The migration was completed back in March and we have allowed several months since then to give customers the opportunity to check that their sites are working and get in touch with us should they encounter problems.
The old servers are going to be removed/decommissioned towards the end of this week.
**If you have a website or content uploaded to our CGI platform, and you haven't done so already, then please check that everything is present and working in the new environment**
We will be unable to recover any data from the old CGI FTP servers after they have been decommissioned. Database content will be retained for a short while longer, however we will only be able to restore from this in exceptional circumstances and it too will be deleted before long.
If you have any questions or concerns about this announcement then please head over to our discussion forums where we'll be on hand to help -
https://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/board,6.0.html
We've also posted a announcement on our service status page.
Thanks,

Re: Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

Penny — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 09:04:39 GMT

Quote from: Chris
This is an announcement about the recent migration of customers' webspace content from our legacy CGI web hosting platform to a new hosting environment managed via the Control Panel at hosting.plus.net
The old servers are going to be removed/decommissioned towards the end of this week.
**If you have a website or content uploaded to our CGI platform, and you haven't done so already, then please check that everything is present and working in the new environment**

"towards the end of this week" is a pretty short timeframe
Added to which, a significant percentage of affected customers may not be members of this forum, or get notifications when either announcements or hosting-and-domains posts go up.
I *know* there have been a couple of e-mails gone out to each account (before the "migration" started and after it was completed) but judging by recent posts in the Hosting + Domains area, some customers have only recently discovered things have changed. People have busy lives and things don't always register as directly affecting them.
Would a final just-in-case e-mail to customers not be possible? (and maybe a slight delay on nuking the servers).

Regards,
Penny.

Re: Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

bobpullen — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:13:05 GMT

Quote from: Penny
"towards the end of this week" is a pretty short timeframe

The migration was completed during the first week of March. I consider four months+ to be more than sufficient time for customers to notice that something's amiss and report the problem to us. If they haven't, then I'd have to question how important their hosted files/websites must be?

Quote from: Penny
Added to which, a significant percentage of affected customers may not be members of this forum, or get notifications when either announcements or hosting-and-domains posts go up.

As you've alluded to, customers have been sent at least three emails about the changes.

Quote from: Penny
People have busy lives and things don't always register as directly affecting them.

Whilst I understand what you're saying, we can't leave these servers on indefinitely and we need to be out of the data suite where they're located during the next month or two.

Quote from: Penny
Would a final just-in-case e-mail to customers not be possible? (and maybe a slight delay on nuking the servers).

It would be possible, but because we enlist the help of a third party to send emails it would come at a cost. A cost that's a little difficult to justify if I'm honest. Neither was it factored into the original project plan.
We've no pending restoration requests (I've personally checked), and in the unlikely event that we receive any, we will have a local copy of customers' old database content for a while longer.

Re: Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

TORPC — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:31:54 GMT

How long is a while longer ?

Re: Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

Penny — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:01:14 GMT

Quote from: Bob
Whilst I understand what you're saying, we can't leave these servers on indefinitely and we need to be out of the data suite where they're located during the next month or two.

Yes I'd realised there might be constraints of some kind, just not that they were of that nature.

Quote from: Bob
because we enlist the help of a third party to send emails it would come at a cost. A cost that's a little difficult to justify if I'm honest.

Appreciate the very full reply - probably PN have done everything that could be expected, it's just that us customers don't always get things dealt with quite when we should (because of life-events, health issues, work overloads or whatever), so I was just wary of anyone suddenly becoming aware, in the weeks ahead, that something of importance had "gone forever".
Reassured to know that there will be a local back-up around for a while - probably won't ever be needed (like most back-ups) but good to know, anyway.

Regards,
Penny.

Re: Notice to users of our CGI Web Hosting platform - Monday 21st July

bobpullen — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:46:18 GMT

Quote from: TORPC
How long is a while longer ?

A month.