Both VPS servers upgraded and general news

This a quick update to say that both VPS servers have been successfully upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1. New automation has been in place and refined over the last year, allowing us to failover between the two machines in as little as 15 minutes. This has been a goal for OP-EZY for around a decade.

Quite a lot has been happening behind the scenes at OP-EZY International HQ, including the transition to The Hawdon Group. Currently, we're keeping things under wraps, but expect to see some more news regarding this in the future.

This doesn't mean the OP-EZY name is going away any time soon, however. But we hope to be able to bring some more exciting news soon.

All services offline

All OP-EZY services are currently offline due to the DreamHost outage. We hope the service will be restored as soon as possible. For further updates regarding DreamHost, please visit their status page: https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

End of an era. OP-EZY's in-house hosing decommissioned

OP-EZY has been online since November 2005, for many years we were hosting on site, on a very slow Internet connection. Though by use of a great concoction of caching and compression techniques, we were able to keep the sites hosted functional.

A couple of years back, we started branching out to using cloud hosting, as the sites starting getting more traffic. The in-house server was kept as a backup. We have since upgraded the cloud infrastructure further and felt in-house hosting was no longer a viable option.

OP-EZY is still dedicated to quality hosting, and the sites are still getting hundreds of hits a day. We are certainly not closing up shop.

I will close this status updated with a short video of the in-house server being decommissioned.

In-house hosting: 2005-2018

OP-EZY 8.0

The OP-EZY International website has been updated to version 8.0. Visually it looks similar, but underneath it's a totally different beast. It's now running on WordPress, with the theme adapted from MagicPage to slot in place on WordPress.

Why the change? Well, the code powering MagicPage hadn't been updated in 4 years. 4 years is a long time to go without updates, and as there wasn't enough time to maintain it, we decided it was easier, and safer to switch to an actively developed CMS instead. Also, at the end of this month, OP-EZY International will have been online for 10 years, so an update to the site was long overdue.

That being said, we can finally announce general availability of MagicPage CMS which is available here: https://github.com/roberthawdon/magicpage

Please feel free to fork it and make it great. Be warned if you're going to use it on your own site, it's protected by Swiss Cheese Security™ - one of the many reasons we didn't release the code until all of our sites were no longer running on it.

Cheers

Introducing the new INTACTA.CODE website

A few years ago, we launched the INTACTA.CODE site, dedicated to bringing information about a technology that to me (Robert Ian Hawdon) was very interesting at the time.

OP-EZY has recently launched a new site hosting service, and to test it out, we've launched a brand new INTACTA.CODE site which can be found at the following address:

https://intactacode.op-ezy.co.uk/

This also coincides with the release of Intacta Express which will allow users to create INTACTA.CODE files.

Cheers

2015-09-02 17:53 UTC - Hardware Failure

2015-09-12 00:15 UTC - The new server at OP-EZY HQ is in the process of being built.

17:02 UTC - Jacks Trade is back online with IPv6 support and SSL

16:07 UTC - King Size Films (https://kingsizefilms.op-ezy.co.uk) is back online.

15:46 UTC - Ponteland High Yearbook (https://www.pchsyearbook.org.uk) is back online, also with IPv6 support.

2015-09-06 14:46 UTC - Main OP-EZY site (https://op-ezy.co.uk) is back online, a few subdomains still to be migrated. Both OP-EZY and Robert Ian Hawdon are available on IPv6 (still experimental).

2015-09-05 13:49 UTC - We have purchased a replacement server for OP-EZY HQ, this will be configured as our backup and DR host.

2015-09-04 17:47 UTC - https://robertianhawdon.me.uk is back online and running off our VPS server hosted by Bhost.

2015-09-03 22:15 UTC - We've purchased a virtual server and will be transferring some sites across to it. We've also got the main in house OP-EZY server back operational, and we'll be using that for backups once we're happy everything is stable again.

21:48 UTC - More investigation needs doing. Issues are still occurring with 4 blank hard drives.

19:56 UTC - Sites back offline as new disks have just reported to have failed

19:26 UTC - Bringing sites back online

19:12 UTC - We've been able to recover the majority of services hosted on Linux server 01 and Windows server 01. The one of the disks in that array is currently rebuilding. Unfortunately, Linux server 02 and 03 were lost due to a misconfiguration of their RAID array which was destroyed when the second disk failed. We are looking into ways to further backup these systems to ensure this doesn't occur again.

We are currently aware of total loss of service due to two failed hard drives, we are working on recovering as much data as possible and hope to be back online as soon as possible. Currently there's no ETA.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

2014-12-29 - 20:08 UTC: Service restored

Evening,

I'm glad to announce that service has been restored.

Cheers