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Server Upgrade – All you need to know

We are upgrading our servers on Saturday, 25 November 2017  –  This page gives you all the information you need
What is happening?
 

Server technology continues to evolve extremely rapidly. Our servers have always been hosted in our data centre in the North-west of England, we’re now taking a significant technological leap and migrating our application to the latest range of Cloud servers available. These are performance-optimised virtual machines, backed by lightning-fast SSD storage and are interconnected by the latest next-generation network technology available.

 

 

What does this mean – is there any downtime?
 

Yes – regrettably there will be a small amount of downtime. We will take the existing servers down at 8 AM on Saturday 25th November and anticipate having the migration completed within a few hours at the most, maybe significantly less but we want to give you as accurate a prediction as we can.

So, from 8 AM to approximately 11 AM on Saturday you will not be able to access Collabor8online.

Any users trying to use the application at that time will see a “server maintenance” holding page.

Why are you doing this?
Our user numbers are grown rapidly over the last 12 to 18 months, we are delighted with this but we wanted to upgrade the servers before the increase user base has any significant effect on performance.  We are also anticipating significant growth in users next year with more features in the pipeline and more functionality, we needed to make sure that the backend was in the best possible shape.
Will users see improved performance?
YES – that’s the good news, we’ve observed a 60% increase in speed over a range of tests on the new service. It has to be said that an improvement in speed will be dependent on your own Internet connection. If you have any concerns about your Internet connection speed contact your own systems administrator, who in turn can talk to us we’d be delighted to help if we can.
Will there be more upgrades in the future and do you expect any more downtime?
This upgrade is a major upgrade, hence the downtime. The good news is that because we’ve done this now, as we carry out further upgrades and expansions in the future (which we plan to do) we don’t envisage any more server downtime in the foreseeable future.

Background

Last year we carried out our last significant upgrade when we upgraded the data storage aspect of Collabor8online (the place where all the files and data stored) to an “object storage” service, where your files are automatically distributed over multiple storage devices and across multiple data centres for maximum resilience and reliability. The reason is done this way is that in terms of reliability there can be no one single point of failure. Each piece of data file is replicated three times, and if one instance should “fail” the system automatically re-spawns a further copy. This is an established method and ensures that your files are never lost.

Security

Collabor8online is designed to be secure. Data in transit is encrypted using the https protocol and stored encrypted “at rest” (on disk), plus your data is stored in UK data centres which adhere to the highest standards of security and compliance. Our data centres are certified to ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, OHAS 18001, BS 25999-2 and PCI DSS.

With Collabor8online, your data never leaves the UK.

Call us 020 3369 6491

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