Over the last 3 months, ACS has been implementing a program to upgrade of all our ISP servers and this server was to be one of the last to be replaced. It had been planned to move all customers off the server and retire it in the near future, but we had to bring these plans forwards following the server un-recoverable hardware fault.

Most customer services were restored within 4 hours of the server failure thanks to our policy of having redundant capacity on our backup servers, but a few customers (typically those for whom we do not control domain name nameservers) suffered longer outages for which we apologise and thank clients for their patience. It does, unfortunately, take a finite amount of time (24-48 hours) for nameserver changes to filter though the whole of the internet.

All customer websites and email services are now hosted on our new generation of servers which have enhanced efficiency, redundancy and monitoring designed-in. Although the server failure we experienced was an unusual occurence (infact, it has happened to only 3 web servers across our network in the last 10 years), servers, like all other PCs do occasionally suffer such problems, but our policy of continually upgrading servers and building-in resilience does try to reduce the risks of this happening.

Thanks once again for the patience of all those affected.

We apologise for the disruption caused and can assure you that we are ensuring that our data centre treats the replacement of the server as a priority (even though the majority of customers have been temporarily moved off it onto one of our fallback servers).

If you need further information or want an update, please do not telephone us (as all engineers will be busy getitng sevices resumed). Please visit the Our Status link at our support site https://support.namesandspace.net instead. The latest updates will always be posted her first.

We have a formal disaster recovery plan covering eventualities such as this, right up to the loss of premises and key staff members – I would advise all customers, regardless of their size to consider having their own.

The easiest way to approach this is to consider what would be the most devastating thing that could effect your business network (Loss of a server ? A denial-of-service attack ? An ex-staff member selling your secrets to a competitor ?) and then double it. Then make sure you have systems in place to ideally prevent it happening in the first place or to deal with it if it does.

If you need help with this, contact our consultancy department who offer fixed-price Disaster recovery/Business Continuity consultancy services for the smaller business and more bespoke services for our larger customers.