Dear HarmonySite administrator,
In the aftermath of January's server outage, when your HarmonySite was offline for nearly 24 hours, we promised to improve our infrastructure surrounding such incidents. We can never claim that servers won't ever go offline, but when they do, we need to make it easier for you to know about it, and/or report it to us.
In a previous announcement, I explained how our support email system is now no longer hosted on the same server as the websites, so if the website server goes down, you can still contact our support team.
Today we've added a new capability to our systems: A status page: http://status.harmonysite.com
This new page will show you, at a glance, the status of the HarmonySite infrastructure - what's "up", what's "down". If there's anything that's interrupting the proper functioning of your HarmonySite, it will be listed on this page. You will also be able to review historical incidents, and see any upcoming scheduled maintenance.
In the top-right corner of that page is a "Subscribe" button. You can use that to subscribe your email address to be notified if there are any upcoming or ongoing incidents. Notifications will also be posted to Twitter (@HarmonySite), so if you have a Twitter account and check it regularly, you won't need to subscribe your email address to the status-notifications system.
I encourage all of you to either subscribe or follow us on Twitter.
Upcoming Maintenance
As it turns out, there is some upcoming maintenance on our server. It has been listed on our new Status page, and is outlined below...
Some of you will have noticed intermittent issues uploading large files to your HarmonySite. Sometimes the uploads simply fail, other times they "succeed", but the resulting file is empty. Even if successful, the file upload is slow, taking much longer than usual to complete.
We have identified the cause of this issue. To fix it, we actually need to take the server offline, and install some new hardware. This will happen this coming Friday March 6th. The server will be offline for 10 to 30 minutes, somewhere within a 4-hour window:
- Between 8am and 12 noon - US Pacific Time
- Between 3am to 7am (SATURDAY) - Australian Eastern Summer Time
- Between 4pm to 8am - London Time
Unfortunately we can't give an exact start/end time.
Downtime should be no more than 30 minutes (more likely around 10 minutes). Your website and email service will be down for that time, and will come back online automatically at the conclusion of the maintenance. The support email system will NOT be affected.
Please contact me ASAP if you have any concerns about this upcoming downtime.
Please share this email with anyone in your organisation that may be interested.
Cheers,
Mark Virtue
HarmonySite
Australia
+61 2 8005 4277 (Australian number)
In North America, call: 1-415-651-7009 (San Francisco number)
Skype name: mvirtue
