Planned server restarts

[DigitalSeed]

Hi,

I just had my VPS disappear offline for 2 minutes whilst I was working on it - after checking the event logs, it appeared it'd been switched off and restarted (not shut down, merely powered off). Having spoken to someone via online chat, it transpires that at 14.45 or thereabouts this afternoon planned maintenance/updates were made on the server which hosts my VPS and a reboot was required. Alan V did explain that in the case of an extended planned outage, customers would be made aware of this ahead of time, however as this was only a reboot this was not done.
My issue is that I was working on the server at the time and could have potentially lost a fair amount of work, not to mention the fact that the VPS doesn't appear to have been shutdown and services such as SQL server stopped gracefully. As much as I believe outages like this should be made out of peak hours, I would still rather receive prior warning of anything that may even potentially cause an outage to my service and furthermore is it not possible to perform a shutdown on the VPSs on a server rather than just pull the plug?

Thanks,

Andy

[vzAddict]

Hello,

When we do any upgrades OR maintenance on the main server we send notifications one week prior to performing any task on the Server. But in this case we had to apply some critical security updates to protect the server as well as the VPSes from any security risk. Since we had to apply those updates in emergency, we were unable to notify the customers nor we had the time to wait till late night to install the updates.

I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

[DigitalSeed]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply. I was under the impression that it was planned rather than emergency work, which makes things slightly different. Having said that, is there no mechanism that could be used to warn users of an pending restart? 2 potential solutions that spring to mind are network shutdown of the VPS with say a 5-10minute advanced warning that would allow any users logged on to finish what they were doing or a popup of some description that would do a similar job of warning user?

Andy

[Rock]

Hi Andy,

Thank you for writing back. We do understand the situation when hours of work/important data is lost due to such unexpected reboots. We'll make sure to send a quick notification to our VPS clients if incase the host server needs any such unplanned/emergency updates/maintenance in the near future..

[eUK-Martin]

Windows some times can become very critical and changes would only reflect after a restart. VPS is a host in a shared environment and different clients come with different requirements some times to fulfill one request guys have to prepare the node to accept the changes on the VPS and then apply it on the host VPS. On some occasions it is Parallels who would make up with critical updates to be installed on the node and then on a VPS. eUkhost owns more than 200 nodes and it make it bit inconvenience to notify clients about the restarts.

I completely understand you concern about the data on your VPS but I am not sure that we have any medium to notify client with a POP-up on their screen about the restart. However this can be requested to the developers of the product we use for visualization.

[jordan]

To be Honest Even my server has lost power with eukhost

And Been rebooted Because of Power Stuff this could Currupt A Server if it is Doing Something Big

[jc8654]

I have a feeling you may be referring to the massive power outage to the entire DC here which was caused by the backup power supply. This one wasn't anything to do with eUK and was beyond their control.

[bobxbobx]

I only had this ever happen to me once, but since vthen it's been ok.