Posts Tagged ‘downtime’

From time to time, emergency maintenance is required on our servers to prevent unforeseen downtime. This evening, our web hosting company will be doing maintenance on the server that includes all site hosted by Kephart + Associates. This maintenance will be replacing a failed solid state drive used for caching web pages and other content hosted on the server. This drive is affecting performance and monitoring.

The maintenance time frame is between midnight and 4:00 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, June 24th. Actual downtime should be less than that, possibly about 90 minutes. During that time, your web sites will be unavailable. Service should be restored in time for business hours on Friday.

Some websites hosted by Kephart + Associates may have been unavailable intermittently this morning due to a failure in the DNS nameservers at our service provider, MediaTemple. The problem began about 10:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday. As of 12:15 p.m. EDT Tuesday, it appears that services have been restored, though there may be some residual issues as the nameservers come back online.

DNS nameservers are a special type of web server that act as a main directory for the web, pointing requests for pages from browsers to the proper web server that holds that page. If the nameservers are unavailable, pages can’t be served properly.

In addition to web pages, this outage may have also affected email service during the downtime, however all email should be delivered once service has been completely restored.

Thanks for your understanding.