DSA Media News and Information
Excessive Server Load – update
Following on from our earlier report of downtime due to excessive load from two accounts, a third account running the same software as one of the others has also placed the server under considerable load, crashing it and then overloading it on restart. The data centre engineer has locked the offending site down to prevent it continuing to cause issues and has assured us that he will continue to monitor the server closely.
With regards to the longer term stability of the server, we’ve discussed the matter with the site owners and have agreed upon changes to be made, including moving sites off the server to protect it. Once again this is a measure that we would prefer to not have to take, however it remains our priority to ensure the best performance of our server for the majority of sites.
Once again, we apologise for the disruption and we will continue to take any necessary steps to ensure we provide the service that your sites deserve.
Excessive Server Load
This morning we’ve been forced to take the extreme measure of suspending two sites for placing the server under continuous, excessively high load resulting in slow response times and several crashes. Whilst this is a measure that we’re not happy to have to take our priority is to maintain the service for all of our clients, and so this has been necessary. We will work with the affected account holders to help them prevent this re-occurring, and in the event that this isn’t possible will assist them in moving to a more appropriate platform.
We apologise for the disruption that this high load has caused users and hope that the emergency measures taken will address the issue.
For reference we’d also like to draw our users’ attention to our standard hosting terms which outline some of the actions which may be necessary in these circumstances.
Network Hardware Failure
Earlier this afternoon the datacentre housing our servers suffered an unexpected failure to the SAN. This affected a large portion of the datacentre, including our servers, and resulted in a lengthy period of downtime that we were unable to predict and powerless to prevent. Work commenced immediately to restore services and completed a short time ago.
Whilst our servers are back up and running there maybe the possibility of some associated issues being experienced by some accounts. If you find this to be the case please contact us as soon as possible and we’ll do what we can to help as a matter of urgency.
Unfortunately as it affected the two servers hosting both our company and status sites it resulted in us not being able to keep affected clients updated through the usual channels. We did, however, post updates to our Twitter and Facebook pages and encourage clients to follow those as an additional source of information.
We apologise for the disruption that this will have caused to many of our clients and are working with the datacentre to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
Network Routing Issue
Earlier this evening a network routing problem experienced by a 3rd party ISP interrupted access to the London data centre which houses our servers. This may have resulted in some visitors being unable to access web sites hosted on our customer server as well as to our status site (which is hosted separately). Whilst this issue does not originate from our service, we do apologise to anyone affected by it.
Wolverley School Testimonial
We’ve recently completed a number of small enhancements and a couple of large projects for Wolverley School who run a very busy Intranet site using WordPress. The work has included a file storage system, to allow students and staff to upload files from home or school and be able to access them from another computer, and some smaller enhancements to allow the staff to select which news categories they choose to see news from on the front page and to also mark news posts as ‘read’ so that they disappear and they don’t see them again in their main news stream.
We also received the following testimonial from them:
Wolverley CE Secondary School used DSA media to assist us in creating an in house school management and VLE system. DSA Media went above and beyond our expectations with a difficult, bespoke brief – with fast and efficient product delivery, support and advice.
We would (and do) actively recommend them to those who are looking for any of the services they offer.
Wolverley CE Secondary School – www.wolverley.worcs.sch.uk
