History / Recent Events
15th February 2024 - New Automated Monitoring and Auditing Services
As part of our ISO Accreditation application and business practices, we have now updated our monitoring solutions so all services are scanned on a more frequent basis.
Customer services are scanned every minute for availability, and we have increased our vulnerability scanning using our new monitoring service.
In line with our "Simple Service" ethos - this service page now only shows a simple report - and automatically expands with more detailed information in the event of a fault, maintenance window or other event
20th January 2024 - New Ticket System for Customer Support Services
We have deployed a new ticket management suite to enable customers to email us using a dedicated (per-product) email address that will feed directly into our support team's ticket management system. Customers do not need to login to a seperate portal - simply continue to use your favourite email client and send emails as usual.
All Partners and Resellers have been sent a setup pack that allows you to integrate your own email services directly - enabling direct support with your own chosen email addresses/domains
All direct customers will receive instructions on using a new email address - please ensure you direct all support queries to the new address to ensure our entire team can respond as quickly as possible.
10th January 2024 - Critical Microsoft CVE Patches Applied
At approx 17.15hrs Microsoft KB5034273 was automatically applied to mitigate threats from CVE-2023-36042, CVE-2023-0056, CVE-2023-0057 and CVE-2023-21312
This led to a momentary loss of service to some affected servers whilst services restarted
2nd-16th December 2023 - Datacenter Upgrades and Migration
We have completed the migration of our old datacenter services to new hardware and software platforms.
As well as software upgrades, DC2 now has expanded and upgraded hardware to provide additional services and redundency options. All services now support full replication service across all locations
Stage 1 - Completed 8th December - Routing Services, Charity Services and all Test Services.
Stage 2 - Completed 9th/10th December - Migration of DNS Servers and other non-essential services, UK Dedicated Hosting Services were moved
Stage 3 - Completed 9th December - CodeStep.UK, WebDesk Pro SaaS services and SaaS Licence Services
Stage 4 - Completed 16th December - England-Specific SaaS Services
Stage 5 - Completed 16th December - UK-Specific SaaS Services
Stage 6 - AVAILABLE FROM 8th January 2024 - Operating System Upgrades will be available to any customer with a service contract Free of Charge. Downtime Required.
8th November 2023 - Replication Service Failure
A replication failure occured at 10.05am between DC1 and DC2 following a process fault in the replication service. Services were restarted.
A replication delay of approximately 20 minutes occured whilst services were restarted and re-synchronisation completed. No customer services were affected, and replication has recovered for all Live Services. A Full Services Suite Reboot occured out of hours at 8.50pm to ensure stability.
19th September 2023 - Windows Server Servicing Failure
A servicing failure occured during the installation of Microsoft Update KB5030213 resulting in a rollback of the Active Directory (Europe 2) PDC updates. The Failover Services were immediately activated whilst the primary DC was restored and corrected. No customers were affected during the failover or recovery stages, and all dependent services were re-routed. All services were restored at 11.29am on 20th September.
16th August 2023 - DC3 Hardware Failure Event
A Hardware Failure was detected in DC3 on 16th August 2023. Some services were suspended in DC3 and transferred to the alternate datacenter.
The effects included a failover to the assigned backup DC4, with Active Directory (Europe 2) and associated replication services being re-routed. Customer Services were not affected.
The Donated Charity Services were reduced whilst DC4 handled the additional loads of DC3, with a 77% performance limit applied to ensure the smooth operation of DC4
Following the Hardware Replacement, services were restored and re-routed to the original locations - during which there was a 5 minute delay in replication of customer services during the reversal operation. All events were completed within the SLA period, and no negative customer effects occured.