Important - Major Hsphere Control Panel Upgrade Starting Friday, October 5th, 2007 At 12:00 Am Edt (gmt-4)

[velma 6]

Dear Customer,

 

In an effort to bring more services and features to our clients we will be performing a major control panel upgrade 12:00 AM EDT (GMT-4) on Friday, October 5th, 2007. We will be performing this maintenance in order to offer the users more control of the services and selection of features. Here the Control panel will be upgraded to Hsphere 3.0 Patch6.

 

New features that will be made available are:

 

1. Possibility to tag an email as virus according to the attachment's MIME Type:

 

2. Better mailbox list navigation in user control panel.

 

3. Possibility to switch asp.net versions right from control panel on Windows based hosting accounts.

 

4. Possibility to switch PHP versions (PHP4 and PHP5) right from control panel on Windows based hosting accounts.

 

5. Major improvement in Windows Shared SSL implementation making it much more stable.

 

6. Even more selection in One-click installer (EasyApp) for Linux hosting accounts.

However this feature may take time to be available since it need MySQL upgrade that will be done separately.

 

Major points to be noted here:

 

1. No new Catch All mailboxes will be possible. Existing mailboxes will continue to run as is.

 

2. MySQL DBs will remain on version 4.0.27 for now and we will be upgrading DB servers to MySQL 4.1 one by one.

There will be a separate announcement made for this, along with the possible schedule.

 

3. EasyApp collection will be disabled for this time and enabled at a later date, once all our MySQL servers are atleast running MySQL4.1 or higher.

 

All customers are quested to ensure their applications are compatible with MySQL5.0.

 

Important : If you are running any readymade application or installed is from the EasyApp collection, please update it to the latest release to avoid MySQL database version compatibility issues.

 

Downtime details:

 

 

1. Control panel will be down for upto 48 hours. (this will be done in multiple phases)

 

2. There will be no downtime for any MySQL or PostgreSQL database during the upgrade.

 

 

MySQL Upgrade will not be done at this time but separately, upgrade Schedule for which will be announced shortly.

 

 

The Control Panel Upgrade Phases

 

1. The first phase being the control panel server itself, this will involve the control panel services being completely down for the period of the upgrade.

 

2. The next phase will be server upgrades of windows servers and MS-SQL Servers.

This change brings some major permissions changes to the Windows Servers, including an entirely new layout for authentication and permissions for anonymous web users. We will strive to keep all outages to as minimal as possible, but 3 hours time is to be expected during the permissions changes.

 

3. We will not be performing all windows upgrades at the same time in order to minimize downtime and focus on a single server at a time ensuring sites remain available and testing after the upgrade is complete on each server.

Before this upgrade commences, we will be updating all our Windows and Linux servers to the latest OS patches.

 

 

Our goal in this upgrade is to bring as many new features as possible, but in a manner with the least impact on your site and business ventures.

 

Regards,

 

Velma R.

Sales Executive.

Xisto - Web Hosting.com