As part of our continuing improvements to services, we will be performing some upgrades to our servers at the UK datacenter in the coming week.

Most of these will be behind the scenes and will not impact the availability of websites or other services whilst they are being done.

However, between a window of 9pm GMT+1 and 11pm GMT+1 on Wednesday 18th May 2022 there may be brief periods of disruption to the email services and control services (such as the Helm Control Panel, SmarterStats and database administration) whilst the upgrades are performed. This is not expected to be more than approximately 10-15 minutes during the window.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused by these upgrades. If you have any questions about these, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We are pleased to announce that we have begun the process of rolling out the latest version of .Net from Microsoft, which they released a few days ago. This will allow our customers to develop in the latest Microsoft technologies for their website.

For customers in our US datacenter, .Net 6.0 is available to use now. 

For customers in our UK datacenter, .Net 6.0 will be available to use when your website is running on Windows Server 2022. Some websites have already been migrated to Windows 2022 and so can use .Net 6.0 straight away. For other websites, the migration date has been sent to you via email. All websites will be migrated by the 22nd November 2021.

.Net 6.0 can be used in the same way as .Net 5.0, by enabling the setting on your website under the "Website Settings" icon in the control panel.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

IN THIS NEWSLETTER     

1. Upgrades Overview
2. £1.49 UK Domains
3. UK Mail Server Upgrade
4. UK MySQL Server Upgrade
5. UK SQL Server Upgrade
6. UK Web Server Upgrades
7. Logging & Backup Limits from January 2022

Dear Customers,

We hope that you have been keeping well during this ongoing worrying period for many people. Today we have a lot of important information to share with you regarding upgrades to our services in the UK that are taking place in the remainder of 2021, which are detailed below. There are also some forthcoming changes to some of our data retention policies in January, which are at the bottom of this message and are important to be aware of. Finally, our £1.49 UK domain promotion has been running throughout September and October and finishes in a few days, so don’t miss out on your chance to save 85% on as many UK domains as you like – see below!

1. Upgrades Overview 

Whilst the pandemic has delayed some of our plans due to the associated transportation and supply issues, we are now ready to announce our latest round of upgrades to our UK network, which will be improving a large number of our services. You may already have noticed improvements to some services as a result of changes behind the scenes and the installation of new equipment at the datacenter in the past couple of weeks, but the migrations of the largest services are now being scheduled - including to the servers hosting Email, MySQL and SQL Server, as well as all of the web servers.

The most obvious change for websites will be the upgrade to the brand new latest edition of Microsoft's server operating system - Windows Server 2022. All of our UK customer servers will be running on this new operating system by the end of this year. At the same time we will be moving many services onto new hardware, including improved specifications and fast SSD drives for all services. This is coupled with improvements to how we deploy and run servers, to increase their reliability and our ability to recover more quickly from any hardware failures, or avoid any disruption altogether.

Although originally we had intended to do all of this in one go, the hardware upgrades for some services have had to be delayed due to ongoing supply issues. We have decided therefore to proceed with the move to Windows 2022 on all servers now, and complete the hardware upgrades over the coming months as stock arrives in. This will be being done in the background with no disruption (which is possible due to the new Windows 2022 servers all being virtualised), so the only brief disruption will be in the move to Windows 2022, which is set out in more detail below.

These upgrades only affect our UK network, they do not affect the US network, which has already been upgraded more recently.

Details on all of the migrations that are happening can be found below, and we are looking forward to continuing to serve your hosting needs on our new improved hardware and software setup. If you have any questions about any of these changes, please do not hesitate to contact us in the normal way.

2. £1.49 UK Domains

Just quickly before we get to the upgrade details, our promotion on UK domains that has been running throughout September and October is finishing on Sunday - don't miss your chance to get all new .co.uk, .me.uk, .org.uk and .uk registrations at the special price of £1.49 (exc VAT) for the first year, saving £5.50 + VAT. The cut off for orders at this price is 10pm UTC on the 31st October. There is no commitment to continue to renew for future years. You can order easily at any time through the control panel, just click on "LiquidSix Domain Registrations" and follow the link to register a new domain - you will be charged the special promotional price and there is no limit as to how many domains you can order at this price.

For details, please see here:

https://www.liquidsix.com/ukpromotion/

3. UK Mail Server Upgrade

The first of our migrations onto new hardware will be the UK mail server. We will be upgrading to the latest version of SmarterMail during the move to the new hardware, with fast SSD drives storing all data and running on Windows 2022. There will be no changes to IP addresses or any other configuration.

Date: Saturday 6th November 2021
Maintenance Window: 00:30 to 06:00 UTC
Expected Downtime: Approximately 1 hour during the above window

4. UK MySQL Server Upgrade

Happening on the same day as the mail server upgrade, we will be moving the MySQL server to new hardware. During the move to the new hardware (with fast SSD drives storing all data and running on Windows 2022), we will also be upgrading to the latest version of MySQL 5.7. There will be no changes to IP addresses or any other configuration. This will affect the main shared/reseller MySQL server only, and does not affect customers using MySQL on low density hosting, which will be moved separately.

Date: Saturday 6th November 2021
Maintenance Window: 00:30 to 06:00 UTC
Expected Downtime: Approximately 30 minutes during the above window

5. UK SQL Server Upgrade

The next upgrade will be to SQL Server.  We will be migrating all databases onto a new SQL Server installation on Windows 2022 with new hardware, including fast SSD drives. We are already using the latest version of SQL Server, so there will be no change to the version in use as a result of this migration. Both customers on the main shared/reseller SQL Server and those on low density hosting will be affected, but at different times during the migration window. There will be no changes to IP addresses or any other configuration.

Date: Sunday 7th November 2021
Maintenance Window: 00:30 to 06:00 UTC
Expected Downtime: Approximately 1 hour during the above window

6. UK Web Server Upgrades

The largest migration will be all of the websites hosted in the UK onto new Windows 2022 servers. This will be being done over the next couple of months, one server at a time. We are aware that customers may not know what servers their websites are hosted on, unless they have looked in the control panel, so instead of publishing the dates (some of which are still to be confirmed) in this email we will be emailing affected customers 1-2 weeks before their migration takes place. The email will list the affected domains, and give an exact date for the migration. If you have multiple websites with us, they may be on the same server, or on different servers - so you may receive multiple emails over the next few months, one for each migration date, with a list of your domains included in that migration.

Although the upgrade to Windows 2022 is important and brings many benefits in reliability, security and performance, it is not expected to impact the running of websites or require any changes like some previous operating system upgrades have needed, as it will still support all the same features that we use now and work in basically the same way. All of the existing versions of PHP and .Net Framework / .Net Core that we support will continue to be available on the new servers, with all the latest patches and updates being installed on them, although if you are using an older version of any of these (especially PHP 5.x users) we do recommend that you look at upgrading to a newer version as soon as possible. There will be no changes to any IP addresses (and so no DNS propagation to worry about) as the existing IPs will be moved to the new servers.

One area with big improvements is support for newer HTTP protocols and TLS 1.3, which will all be available straight after the migration. To smooth over the transition, we will be continuing to support older SSL/TLS protocols for the rest of this year. However, to improve security for all users, we will be withdrawing support for some older protocols from January 2022, in line with what most companies are now doing. This only affects websites that are using SSL certificates to provide a secure version of their website on a https:// address, it has no effect on standard HTTP sites. We do not expect this to have any significant impact on users, as it is only extremely old (and insecure) browsers and other software that might have issues if they don't support modern security features (but will have the same issues with a large proportion of websites on the internet, and likely almost all HTTPS websites in the near future). The changes have been tested already and allow for HTTPS websites hosted with us to get an "A" rating on the Qualys SSL Labs tests that are widely used to test HTTPS security. If you are concerned about these changes, please contact us for assistance.

For more technical customers, the exact details of older features that will be disabled for security are:

     - SSL2, SSL3, TLS1.0 and TLS1.1 protocols.

     - Encryption ciphers DES, 3DES, and RC4 (so only AES is used).

     - Encryption cipher AES with CBC chaining mode (so only AES GCM is used).

     - RSA key exchange.

     - DH key exchange with key size less than 2048.

     - ECDH key exchanges with key size less than 224.

Due to the way the migrations will be being performed, downtime for websites when they are migrated should be less than 15 minutes, but we wish to give you plenty of notice because of the change of operating system.

The first servers to be migrated to Windows 2022 will be EUROPA and DIONE. Migration emails for customers with websites on these servers will go out later today, but do not worry if you do not receive one, as it just means your websites are not hosted on these servers. You will receive your notifications in the coming weeks. If you do wish to check in advance what servers your websites are on (although it is not necessary), this information is available in the control panel on the "Website Settings" page for a domain.

If you have any questions or concerns relating to the website moves, please do not hesitate to contact us in the normal way.

7. Logging & Backup Limits from January 2022

In order to assist customers in complying with data protection regulations, we will be applying some changes to the retention of some data as from January 2022. These changes are:

1. Website (IIS) log files in the /logs directory of each website will default to being deleted after 2 years. If you have set a different time to keep the logs for (whether it is higher or lower) in the logs.ini file in the /logs directory, then this will still be used. It only affects the default if nothing different has been set. If you wish to change your retention period before the change comes into affect in January, simply edit the /logs/logs.ini file before then - instructions are included in the file itself. The minimum number of days you can keep logs for is 3, with no maximum. 

2. SmarterStats data for websites that have it enabled will be kept for 3 years, after which it will be removed. If you have any concerns about this and would like to discuss options for keeping it longer, please contact us for assistance. 

3. SQL Server backups performed using our web based backup system (myLittleBackup) are currently only deleted when a user specifically deletes them, but are only designed for temporary storage whilst a backup is made, and then downloaded by a user - or when a file is uploaded temporarily to be restored. For this reason, we will be automatically removing backups & restore files 30 days after they are initially created.

These changes will come into effect in January 2022 at the same time as the SSL/TLS changes detailed in the web server upgrades section above.

As always, we would like to thank you for your continued custom. If you have any questions about anything in this newsletter or anything else regarding your services with us, please do not hesitate to contact us via the helpdesk at https://support.liquidsix.com.

Kind Regards,
The LiquidSix Hosting Team

We are currently working on a problem with the UK web server "Io". Websites that are hosted on this server are currently unavailable. Other services such as email are unaffected.

Please accept our apologies for this problem, we are working to get the server back online as soon as possible.

UPDATE 19:08 GMT+1: We are still working to restore this server due to a hardware fault, we apologise for the problems today with websites on this server.

UPDATE 22:30 GMT+1: We apologise for the continued issue with this server. We are continuing the rebuild and transferring data from off-site servers, however some disruption outside of our network is causing this process to go much more slowly than it should do, and normally does. We will be continuing to work through the night to get everything back online as soon as possible.

UPDATE 06:30 GMT+1: We are on the last stage of the process, but the network issue has significantly increased the time that the process should have taken. Based on the current speed, we are predicting all websites should be available by 10:00 GMT. Please accept our apologies again for this delay.

UPDATE 12:15 GMT+1: All websites on the server are now online. We apologise for the length of time that this has taken due to the external disruption. We will be reviewing our procedures and investigating what went wrong in order to prevent this from happening again. We thank all customers for their patience whilst we worked overnight to rebuild the server and work around the disruption.

We are investigating an issue with one of the UK web server's, Sinope, and will post updates as soon as we have them.

UPDATE: We apologise that the sites on this server are offline. There is a serious issue with the web server and we are having to restore the backups taken overnight. We are starting this process now from our off-site backup location and will update here once we have more information.

UPDATE: We are continuing to transfer the backup data from the off-site backup location. We apologise to affected customers that the sites on this server are unavailable whilst this is completed.

UPDATE: The restoration of the data is progressing well and the new server is ready to serve the data when the restoration has been completed. We wish to apologise again for the issues with this server today.

UPDATE: Approximately three quarters of websites are now back online and we are completing work on the rest. Place accept our apologies for the issue with this server today.

RESOLVED: All websites are now back online. If you are still experiencing any issues with websites on this server, please contact us so that we can investigate. We apologise for the time that the sites have been down today whilst we did a complete restore of the server from our off-site backup location.

PHP 8 is now available to use on all of our servers! As not all scripts will be compatible yet, we have not made it the default version (this is currently PHP 7.4), but you can choose to switch to it at any time by clicking on the "Website Settings" icon for the domain in our control panel, and choosing it from the PHP versions dropdown box.

If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.