On Thursday 10th February between 8PM and 9AM the following morning, we are scheduling to replace the hardware that our Linux web sites are hosted on. During this maintenance period we will be taking services offline and websites will display a maintenance page including estimated time that the website will become available again for use.

Once this maintenance completes your website will be reactivated without you needing to do anything. IP addresses and DNS servers will NOT be changing. This maintenance is switching your site to brand new, latest-specification server hardware and also upgrading the Linux control panel from Ensim to Cpanel to bring you a faster, more reliable, and more feature-rich service.

We have put together the following Frequently Asked Questions, which we strongly recommend you read, as it addresses many questions we have received so far and explains in more detail some of the new benefits we will be introducing as part of this maintenance.

We understand that downtime is an inconvenience and very rarely have to schedule maintenance windows in this way. This is a one-off to replace older hardware, keeping your website as fast and reliable as it can be, and bringing you the latest features. If you have any questions after reading the FAQ, please get in touch via this support site (by raising a ticket) so that we can assist you.

Thank you again for your continued business, we truly appreciate it, and look forward to taking care of you throughout these upgrades. We know you will enjoy our services even more once this essential maintenance is completed.

What should I do in preparation for this maintenance?

Answer: We will take care of the entire upgrade process, but you should be prepared for downtime on the date and time given above. We also strongly recommend you set a small amount of time aside the day after your migration to check over your websites, files and logins to check everything moved over smoothly for you. We will have a lot of extra man-power on shift during migration so if you do notice a problem please report it via these pages so we can quickly resolve it and answer any questions you might have.

If you run a busy social site such as a forum, we recommend announcing to your users that the site will be down on the scheduled time we give to you, just out of courtesy.

Will my email be affected?

Answer: No. Our email servers run on a completely different platform, so your email will be completely unaffected during this move.

How much downtime should I expect?

Answer: We will schedule downtime from 8PM on the night of Thursday 10 February, through to 9AM the following morning. During this time your website will show a "down for maintenance" page and will be inaccessible.

We chose to schedule downtime rather than try to perform this work while leaving services online, as a maintenance window allows us to do the move quicker with no server load, and also keep all your IP's and DNS Nameservers the same, meaning no changes being required by you to your domain name(s). Overall, a short window of downtime allows us to reduce the impact of these improvements and remove any necessary work on your part.

Will all my settings and logins be lost?

Answer: We have spent several months working with a dedicated technical team to make a migration process that works really well. Usernames, passwords, mailserver and FTP details will all remain the same! The only usernames that will change are those which are duplicates of others. So if you had 10 sites on Ensim all with the usernames "admin", on Cpanel these would become admin1, admin2, admin3 and so on. Also underscores (_) in admin usernames are removed. We recommend you read the rest of the FAQ in case we highlight any other specific information with regards to your settings and login information.

Please note that to login for email the main site admin would only need to specify "adminusername" as the username (without the need to add @domain.com) while additional email users added by the siteadmin will need to specify the full username when logging in to email (e.g. user123@domain.com). Similarly when the siteadmin wishes to use FTP the username can just be specified as "adminusername" without the need for @domain.com on the end.

Will any software versions change such as PHP and MySQL?

Answer: There are no planned major version changes that should affect you. Cpanel allows us to keep the core operating system files more up to date, and allows us to upgrade other software such as PHP in a MUCH easier way in the future, but for now we intend to remain on PHP 5.2.14 and MySQL 5 during these upgrades.

I currently use a custom php.ini file, will my settings be lost?

Answer: We cannot move the /etc/php.ini file from individual sites on Ensim over to Cpanel, so if you run any site-specific PHP customisations you will need to re-apply these after the maintenance. To apply custom PHP settings with Cpanel you have to copy the php.ini file located at "/usr/local/lib/php.ini" into your html folder, and then make the customisations to the file there. We STRONGLY recommend you take a copy of your php.ini prior to the move.

Will any default PHP settings change?

Answer: Different servers had different settings for some of our Ensim based servers, so it is hard to tell if there will be any change to the default php settings you expect. We are now standardising the php.ini across all our servers, and you can always customise it to your needs if you wish to do so. We are even raising the default resource limits, such as memory_limit up to 64MB!

Will my existing scripts continue to work as normal?

Answer: We have tested heavily over the past few months, and are confident most scripts will continue to function exactly as before after this maintenance. Paths to your web root will change, but we even take care of replacing these changes in your scripts config files.

Obviously there may be occasions where our migration script misses something, or your script is different to the sample we tested, in those cases please test your site after the maintenance and let us know so we can assist you. We recently moved a client server with over 400 domains hosted on it, and only 1 site required manual intervention after the migration.

Will scripting and web root paths change?

Answer: Yes paths will change. But it's not all bad news, as we will automatically search and replace most old paths with the new ones for you, so 99 times out of 100 sites and scripts will have a seamless transition and you will find your config files already fixed for you! On the rare occasion a path is giving an error, please contact support and we'll fix it right away for you if you are not sure how to do so yourself.

Paths will change from "/var/www/html/" to "/home/username/public_html".

Will my IP address change and do I need to make any DNS changes at my registrar?

Answer: No your IP address will not change at all during this move, and nor will your DNS servers! There are no changes of this type that you need to worry about making.

My site needs to be PCI compliant, will the new servers pass PCI scans?

Answer: Yes the new Cpanel servers pass PCI scans with flying colours. If you run a PCI scan and any problems with the server are flagged up we can very easily resolve them for you ready for your re-scan.

Will my site using MySQL continue to work after the move and will my connection details remain the same?

Answer: MySQL connection information including usernames and passwords should remain the same. The only thing that will change is if you have used an underscore or period in your MySQL username, these are no longer supported by MySQL and will be stripped out of your user during the migration, so joe_bloggs would become joebloggs.

Will my cron jobs move over to the new server?

Answer: Yes your cron jobs will be migrated for you. Also cron jobs can now be added, managed and removed from within your Cpanel control panel if you feel comfortable doing this yourself. You can still ask support for help with cron, and we recommend checking all your crons are still working after the migration.

I use a full paid SSL certificate for my site, will this continue to work?

Answer: Yes your SSL certificate will move over as part of the migration and continue to work just as it did before.

Some other important points we would like to make:

• Bandwidth quotas are now going to be a "hard" limit like disk space always has been. This means if a site runs over its allocated bandwidth, the site will go offline and display a suspended page.