From around 18:00 tonight (18th August 2010) our support team will be performing essential maintenance on the MySQL server running on RA.  We anticipate the downtime to be in the range of 30 to 60 minutes.

During this downtime, access to any hosted websites utilising MySQL will be impaired.

Update 19:20

The maintenance work was completed by 18:30.  Normal MySQL service has now resumed on RA.  For live status of our services, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

As part of our normal operating schedule, several of our hosting servers will be undergoing routine maintenance between 18:00 and 19:00 tonight.  During this time, access to some services may be impaired or unavailable.

The ACS Support website will not be affected by tonight’s work and will remain operational should any customers wish to contact our support team.

For live status of all our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

As and when the maintenance work has been completed, our support team will update this blog.

As part of our continuing programming of server renewal, one of our oldest hosting servers, ODIN, is being retired.  Over the past couple of months our technical team has been slowly transferring the websites, services and other responsibilities handled by ODIN to other servers.

For the most part, this process has been transparent to the majority of users.  However, some users may need to change a few setting.  Our support team will be contacting these users in the upcoming days with further information.

According to the current timetable, ODIN will be finally retired at the end of this month.

If you have any queries regarding the possible implictions of ODIN’s retirement may have upon your ACS/NamesAndSpace hosted website, please contact our support team.

To get the latest status of our NamesAndSpace server, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.  This website display the latest status for all of our hosting services and is fed directly from our specialised monitoring systems.

Hosting error messages are specialised pages that appear when something goes awry for a website visitor.  The most common error is the 404, or in English, file cannot be found.  By default, when these errors occur with websites hosted by NamesAndSpace (N&S), the visitor will be taken to a simple error page with NamesAndSpace branding.

As of today (11th June), hosting error messages will now be handled through our support website, ACS Support.  For website owners, this change means that the number of steps required to contact our support team is reduced – with the new messages, you are already on our support website.  For website visitors, the context of the error messages remains unchanged.

Messages customised to your site

The majority of NamesAndSpace hosting packages included the  to specify custom error messages.  Hosting customers may be interested in creating messages that conform to their site’s design and/or to their own wording.   If you are interested in configuring custom error messages for your hosted website, please contact our support team who will be able to assist you further.

Our technical support team has recently upgraded the NamesAndSpace webmail.  The new version of webmail is both faster and easier to use.

If you are a standard NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting customer, you may access webmail at any time.  All you need to know is your e-mail address and password.  Once you have these to hand, open your web browser and go to http://mail.namesandspace.net.

For a guide and more information on N&S Webmail, please see http://support.appliedconsultancy.com/faqs.asp?content_id=3184.

As per our Christmas & New Year Opening Hours, ACS will only be open from 0900 to 1300 on Christmas Eve. After this time, ACS will be closed until the 29th December when our support team will be available to answer your questions.

Please note that we are operating a Remote Support Only service between Christmas and the New Year. Our support website will continue to operate over the festive period, and any submitted tickets will be attended to when we are open.

During the Christmas to New Year period our support and technical team will be performing maintenance work on all of our NamesAndSpace (N&S) servers. Although we aim to minimise interruption to our services, there may short periods where one or more services will be unavailable. To check the status of our servers and their services, visit our live status feed at http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

Advanced warning of service downtime will be announced on Reload, our Support & Development blog. Reload may be found at http://blogs.appliedconsultancy.com/reload.

Details of our Christmas and New Year opening hours have just been published on our support website, ACS Support. As last year, we will be operating a reduced service between Christmas and New Year. For full details, visit our support website at http://support.appliedconsultancy.com.

During the Christmas to New Year period our support and technical team will be performing maintenance work on all of our NamesAndSpace (N&S) servers. Although we aim to minimise interruption to our services, there may short periods where one or more services will be unavailable. To check the status of our servers and their services, visit our live status feed at http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

Advanced warning of service downtime will be announced on Reload, our Support & Development blog. Reload may be found at http://blogs.appliedconsultancy.com/reload.

Our monitoring software has raised an alert with regards to a potential problem with one of our mailservers this morning (21/09/09).  Due to the nature of the issue, our support team will be taking the mailserver offline for a period of around 30 minutes to instigate a fix.

We aim to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.  Further updates regarding this issue will be posted on this blog.

Update 10:30

Normal mail service has been restored as of 10:15 this morning.

Our support team will be performing routine maintenance on our N&S tonight between 1800 and 1900 (UK BST).  This is part of our normal maintenance program.  During this time, access to some services may be either impaired or unavailable.

To avoid any potential issues, we recommend to our hosting customers to avoid making any changes to your websites during this maintenance window.  Furthermore, access to our support website may be unavailable during this time.

f you have any questions or queries regarding this, or any other matter, please contact our Support Team.