You may have noticed our web site outage over the last few days. While were embarrassed by the lack of stability the site has been experiencing over the previous year, our hosting provider decided to force a group of its customers to their new high availability high performance system to ‘improve’ the service.
Despite protesting that it didn’t work properly and could not be tested with the tools provided they went ahead and migrated us anyway.
The day following the migration we lost all access to the control portal preventing us from completing the post migration tasks we were required to undertake. The control panel was unavailable two days.
Once access was regained it soon became apparent that our SSL certificate was not installed (that’s the bit that secures the connection and provides a padlock in the browser window).
It’s now some five days since the botched migration (at time of writing, 13-NOV-2018), the SSL certificate is still not installed (HTTPS) and users cant access the web site and we have no estimate as to the time to fix or cause of the problem.
After raising tickets for the issues and hounding them every four hours asking for meaningful status information, the hosting provider remains silent and only spews out the company message that they are sorry and their engineers are working on a solution.
It’s interesting to note that their status page shows everything to be working with no issues as I write this. Were convinced were not alone with this outage as the usual forums abound at the lack of response from this hosting company whose services I’ve used since 2001. I guess this is my loyalty payback.
With no sign of a solution we were forced to roll up an AWS host (Amazon Web Services) and migrate our data to it. A ground up installation including purchasing the .co.uk domain, installing a valid SSL site certificate and migrating the database was achieved within an evening. Our installation is not final and there’s work to do tidying up the documentation links and checking everything works, however were working on this continually, and expect to have full functionality within the next day or two.
So we’ve moved to megapointscontrollers.co.uk and will set up redirects from the old site once it becomes operational (yes were still dependant on the old hosting provider). Over time we’ll migrate the .com domain over to this server so the .co.uk and the .com all work from this host.
As the performance and stability of our web site had become erratic over the last year we’d decided to do what we’ve just accomplished, however had planned it for the quiet season next year. The new site is fast, responsive and will look identical to the old.
The performance of the new website is a big improvement over the previous site.
The online web shop is operational and can be used for purchases.
Thank you for your understanding.