[M5Hosting] Planned maintenance period - 7/31/05

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear Happy M5 Hosting Customers,

         We are growing ! We just signed the papers to double our rack 
space. Our revenues are double what they were 6 months ago. Our Data Center 
facility plans to double their floor space by the end of the year. Our 
favorite hamburger is the Double-Double from In-N-Out.

Shared Hosting Customers:

         On Saturday evening at 1:00am Pacific Time (OK, that's 0100 on 
7/31/05) we will perform an upgrade to the shared hosting servers. This 
upgrade will require downtime of about 4 hours. This upgrade will more than 
double the capacity of our shared hosting servers.
         As reliable as our shared hosting servers have been, and as 
reluctant as we are to fix something that ain't broke, it's time to upgrade 
the server software, operating system, and hardware.
         We are upgrading the OS from RedHat 9 to RedHat Enterprise 3 ES. 
RedHat 9 has been end of life for some time now. Patches and security fixes 
have been provided by the Fedora Legacy Project, but even this will 
eventually come to an end. RedHat Enterprise is scheduled to be support 
until as late as 2010 and is the quality of the patches and software is 
excellent. This is a very good move for reliability and stability of the 
server that hosts your web site and email.
         We will be upgrading the Plesk control panel software from version 
6 to version 7.5. While version 6 is still supported and viable, the new 
version has some neat new features I am sure you will enjoy. Additionally, 
version 6 will not work on RedHat Enterprise Linux.
         We are upgrading the hardware too. The existing hardware has 
proven to be reliable and normally runs at under 10% CPU utilization. So, 
we are using the same general design, with faster components. The drives 
and CPU fan have been spinning several thousands times per minute for about 
3 years. The new hardware will have a 40% faster CPU, double the memory, a 
faster bus, and double the disk space.
         To perform this upgrade we need to upgrade the old server to the 
current version of the Plesk software. Then we will set up the new server. 
Finally we will transfer all the data, settings, databases, lists, scripts, 
pictures of your children, and all the other goodies to the new server.

         This is a whole lot of work. There will undoubtedly be some bugs 
to squash and some time required to learn the new interface, to tweak the 
back end server configuration, etc. We will be actively testing the new 
server after the upgrade, but we can use your help. If, after the upgrade, 
you find something that doesn't work as expected, please send us an email 
at support[at]m5hosting.com and describe your issue as clearly and 
specifically as possible. Please do this as soon as possible.


Colocation and Dedicated Server customers:
          No downtime is expected as a result of this upgrade of the shared 
hosting servers.

          If you have problems or questions relating to this maintenance or 
for any other reason, please send an e-mail message to 
support[at]m5hosting.com.

Thank you for your trust and your business !
Mike