Sittingbourne Data Centre Consolidation/Migration Commencing 19/09/2011

As you may be aware in February this year we opened a new data centre in Maidstone which has since become our primary site for operations. Since we launched services in Maidstone we have been looking into the possibility of at some point consolidating services from Sittingbourne to Maidstone. Due to recent events in Sittingbourne such as the air conditioning failure last month, a number of network issues and a deteroation in support from the data centre staff we have decided to bring the consolidation forwards to improve service and prevent these problems in Sittingbourne from worsening.

As a result commencing the 19th of September 2011 we will be moving all services from our Sittingbourne point of presence to our new Maidstone data centre. The move will take place over serveral nights commencing at 11PM BST (GMT +1) each night to minimise the effect downtime will have. With the plans we have made it is expected each server will be down for about an hour while we transport it to Maidstone and re-rack it. Each client will receive another e-mail by close of business on the 15th of August 2011 detailing specific time frames and the date your service will be moving.

All services moving from Sittingbourne to Maidstone will not need to change IP's or any DNS resolution as both sites will be bridged together for the migration to take place. Once the migration is complete the network engineers in Maidstone will then commence announcing all of the IP space currently located in Sittingbourne thus meaning that you do not need to do anything from your side.

At this time we would also like to inform you of the advantages this consolidation will have to your services. Firstly it means that our staff will only be supporting one location allowing us to allocate more resources in one place and thus increasing support effeciency. Secondly like with staff it means we can concentrate all of our infrastructure development and budget on developing one data centre which will be starting from the very begining with new Cisco switches for each rack which have better packet control meaning that we will have better visibility and control over any DDoS attacks to try and prevent them from causing problems to the whole network.

Another key element is that the network in Maidstone is substantially better than that of Sittingbourne with 2 dedicated network engineers who are on call 24x7x365 for any urgent problems. These network engineers have worked hard to implement key DDoS mitigation techniques and a fully redundant stable network which have been 2 causes of recent problems at our Sittingbourne site. Our uplinks in Maidstone are also fully IPv6 ready and as such as will be offering IPv6 services to all clients moving over from Sittingbourne to Maidstone such as IPv6 VPS's, dedicated servers, colocation and web hosting.

Due to the higher network capacity and capabilities we have in Maidstone once the move is complete as a thank you we will be doubling all bandwidth allowances. This means that with specific packages such as VPS's and web hosting you will see your bandwidth allowance double from the 1st of October 2011. Colocation and Dedicated Server customers will have their allowances increased to 5000GB inline with the industry standard. These upgrades will also be applied to all customers with services currently in Maidstone.

If you are unsure whether you are located in our Sittingbourne or Maidstone data centre there are a couple of ways you can find out. Firstly if you are a web hosting customer you will be located in our Sittingbourne site. If you are a VPS customer all of our nodes in Sittingbourne start with the hostname "KSPVPS" followed by your node number. Dedicated server and colocation customers services will also start with the service identifier name of "KSP" if you are located in our Sittingbourne site. The following IP ranges are also located in Sittingbourne and will be subject to the migration if you wish to check by your servers IP:

194.0.252.0/24
91.212.182.0/24
91.216.93.0/24

If your service identifier or VPS node starts with "MAI" or your IP address is in one of the following IP ranges you will be unaffected by this migration and you should not expect any downtime. This is an e-mail sent to all customers so customers located in Maidstone will also receive this e-mail.

91.220.127.0/24
91.228.206.0/24
91.227.220.0/22

If you are unsure which node you are on or you have any queries about this migration please contact us by e-mailing support@vooservers.com or by creating a support ticket by logging in to the client portal at https://secure.vooclients.com and we will be happy to help.

Best Regards,
VooServers Support.