As we informed you on 6 March, we had intended to increase the memory (RAM) on server NC018 on 9 March. (Server NC018 hosts the majority of websites, and all email except specialised email services.) This maintenance would have solved performance issues that were happening with more regularity. However, the maintenance failed due to hardware compatibility issues.
When the maintenance failed, we immediately began preparing to acquire new hardware to replace this server. During the week of 11-15 March we obtained a number of proposals and advice on a plan we had begun developing some months ago.
However, on 18 March the mail server was overwhelmed. The most obvious result of this was that email delivery was delayed during peak periods by as many as several hours. While it was not clear exactly why the mail server was overwhelmed, there was an obvious way to deal with the problem. We implemented this, and the mail queue was cleared in a short amount of time. We believed that this approach should have worked to prevent the mail server from being overwhelmed if the mail server again experienced heavy volume, but it did not when the same thing happened on 19 March.
We are therefore urgently preparing to set up new hardware. I don’t have an exact time line for you at the moment, but it is our goal to have the hardware in place and online by the weekend, and we will endeavour to transfer everything as quickly as we can over the weekend.
We will update you on major events by email, but please check our status page once or twice a day at status.niner.net or status.ninernet.net for progress reports.
We apologise for the inconvenience that this transition is causing, and ask for your patience as we go through this upgrade.
