During the next two days we will be making a slight change to our servers.

If experience any problems after we make the change we can toggle settings in your php.ini EZConfig located under the Software / Services section of your cPanel. It’s strongly recommended that after this upgrade you advise me if you’re having any problems with your site.

Most major software platforms will have no issue but some older scripts may require that magic_quotes_gpc be set to on.

As you are aware, we have two servers – acswebservices and acs-webhosting.  For those of you hosted at acs-webhosting there will be scheduled maintenance at 5pm Thursday 20th November AEST.

This is the message I’ve received:

We will be performing scheduled maintenance on your server on November 19th @ 10:00 PM CST (20th @5pm AEST). During this time we will be upgrading our Apache web server to version 2.2.10 (from 1.3.4x). We will also be upgrading the operating system from CentOS 4.7 to CentOS 5.2.

This upgrade will allow us to provide you with a higher level of performance and security. During the upgrade we will also be installing a new set of mod_security rules which will add to the overall protection our clients websites. We will also be upgrading our firewall software which help deflect distributed denial of service attacks and ensure that your sites are kept functioning at optimal levels.

The server will stay online during this time however while the Apache service is recompiled your websites and your client websites will be unavailable for an estimated 30-45 minutes. During this time an unbranded, generic “Under Maintenance” page will be displayed instead of your normal content.

Please take note of this time so you are aware that your site might be temporarily disabled for a short time.

Some sites hosted on acs-webhosting.com may have discovered their front page missing off their blogsite.  Don’t worry – your blog hasn’t gone missing and you can still log in via the wp-admin page.  I’ve notified the web server support and they are investigating it and hopefully should be resolved soon.  My apologies for the inconvenience.

Addendum:  I’ve had a response and it appears that the apache is incorrectly serving the index.htm page for viewing rather than the index.php so I’m manually removing the .htm page off the affected sites while they investigate the cause.

If you have your site or blog hosted on acswebservices.com then you’ll be pleased to know everything was shifted to a new server this weekend and all appears to be working fine. Please do let me know if you detect any problems after about 48 hours – just so we can give things a chance to settle in.

Those with the other server on acs-webhosting.com have no changes to be reported.

Thank you.

Periodically I get the above help message and there are some simple things you can do straight away.

1. Is your web space full?
You can login to the control panel to check that. You should see that you still have space available, or it will let you know if it’s full – usually there is a warning message generated but if your mail box has filled quickly, you might not get it.  If you find that your webspace is getting full quickly, you may need to upgrade your webhosting service to a bigger web space.

2. Is there email blocked in the mail server?
Perhaps someone sent you a huge file that can’t download. If that’s the case, view the offending email and print it off, if necessary, then delete it from your mailbox in your control panel. After that everything should start to download again. You may get repeated messages – that’s normal because the server kept trying to deliver repeatedly and would start all over again till it got to the spot where it was stuck.

3. Have you tried shutting down your computer and starting back up again?
It might just be a temporary problem and rebooting your computer may clear the error.

4. Is there anything else I should know?
Have you recently had something change on your computer, or even changed ISPs?  We may need to do some testing to see what else could be causing it.