We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our backup facilities across all Chicago Shared, Reseller, and VPS systems to the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 software beginning today. This process will disable backup access for a few days, but once the upgrade & backup seed process is completed, you will find the R1Soft Backups link in your cPanel for easy access to backups.

What does this mean for backups in the meantime? Access to R1Soft CDP backups will not be available again until after your server has been seeded in the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 system. This does mean you will not be able to gain access to the older backups, as well.

Are any changes being made to backup policy & retention? Yes. We are changing from an hourly backup schedule to a daily backup schedule with 7 day retention. This will improve service speeds throughout the course of the day, and keep backup hours to a minimum even on our largest systems.

Will I notice anything else? You may notice slight speed degradation while backups are being seeded for the first time. This process should be negligible in its impact on the currently running systems, however, and we do not expect it to cause any problems with site accessibility.

During a rebuild of the hard drive RAID array on the Apollo server, the server crashed causing an extended downtime tonight after encountering some errors during the RAID array rebuild. We were able to recover from the situation after some work, and the server is back online at this time. The RAID array rebuild is not expected to encounter any further issues, however service speed will be slow and intermittently service may become unavailable until the rebuild is complete. Once completed the Apollo server speed should return to normal, fast speeds. We expect this to take around 24 hours total to complete from this time, at the most. We do apologize for this situation and we would like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding throughout the downtime tonight on the Apollo server.

Omega required a reboot this morning and during the restart, a FSCK needed to be performed. The FSCK delayed the server coming back online for approximately an hour.

At this time, the server is online and the name server process is starting back up.  Once the name server process has completed startup, all websites will be back online.

We'd like to thank you for your continued patience with the Omega server. We know the server's performance has not been up to par over the last month and we have already ordered new hardware to replace and upgrade Omega.

There was an outage at our Chicago location today due to a power problem. We are still gathering information concerning the issue, but services are being restored at this time. The latest information concerning this particular issue can be found here: http://steadfast.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2548

11:50AM CST - The Aries server is currently down due to an issue on one of the service partitions causing errors for most dynamic websites. The system is down to run an emergency filesystem check to clear up some journaling issues we were seeing that were the root cause of the error users had seen this morning. We expect the filesystem check process to take around 1 hour and we are monitoring it closely at this time to ensure it completes in a timely manner and to keep updates coming. We apologize for the trouble and inconvenience this may cause for you and your website, and we appreciate your patience as we work through this issue.

12:00PM CST - Judging by the progress of the filesystem check, we expect the Aries server to be back online within 1-2 hours. This is longer than we anticipated but everything is going smoothly thus far and we do not expect any hiccups in the process.

12:52PM CST - Looks like the initial estimate was on target, services should be coming back online within the next few minutes. :)