Portal: There appears to be some disruption at our webhost. Currently investigating the problem. Our host has communicated that it is a connectivity issue. Some of the members, depending on the location, may not be able to visit the site.
Portal hosting migration at 10pm IST, 12 Jan
Dear Members,
Sairam!
Update 2: 11:30 PM, IST. Migration has been completed. Everyone who has the updated DNS record should be able to use the portal once again.
You can flush your computer’s DNS cache by following the instructions in this video.
Update 1: 10:50 PM, IST. Migration has started as planned.
As we had mentioned in our email dated 29th Dec last year, we are going ahead with our plans to migrate our hosting to a managed service to provide for better support of the portal. This will involve at least some degree of service disruption as we move over to the new server.
The window we have kept for this starts at 10 PM IST on the 12th of January, 2012 and it should close before 6 AM IST on the 13th of January, 2012. Our tests have shown that this should not take longer than two-hours, but we also have to factor in unforeseen circumstances not limited to connectivity and related issues.
Moving to the new server will help us provide a much more robust and stable service on the Portal. You can access technical updates/status about this in our external blog http://status.saistudents.org.
Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.
With all our Prema,
Sai Students Portal Team
Outage on Dec 28- Dec 29, 2011 IST
Reply
Dear Members,
SaiRam!
We experienced an unscheduled interruption on the portal over the last two days that lasted approximately 28 hours. Normal service was restored at around 3:30 AM IST on 29th December, and we are glad to inform you that there has been no data loss or other problems. This was due to us being locked out of the server for almost that entire duration by our hosting company, leaving us helpless to address the situation for most of that window of time.
We were already in the process of moving our hosting company due to similar issues in the past, but this latest episode is of a magnitude far beyond anything we have experienced before. As a result we are going to move to a new hosting company at the earliest and we should be on the new set up sometime in the first two weeks of the new year. While the current hosting infrastructure has served us well since our launch in December 2009, the portal has grown in both usage and importance, requiring better technical support. The new infrastructure will be on a fully managed service that should mitigate the problems like the one we just faced.
Unforeseen issues can cause surprises like this one did, but for the most part we have been satisfied with the levels of service we have been able to offer to members. To provide you better visibility and up to date information during any future outage episodes, we have created a blog on a different server that will provide outage details and updates. Please bookmark http://status.saistudents.org/ for reference on outages.
We sincerely regret the downtime and any inconvenience caused. Please let us know if you have any questions by writing to us at admin@saistudents.org or by using the ‘Contact Admin’ dropdown under the Help menu. We certainly appreciate your understanding and support during episodes such as this one.
Delivering you a high quality experience through the portal is our priority and we remain focused on that. We are grateful for your patience and active usage of the portal.
With all our Prema,
Sai Students Portal Team
Outage on Oct 31st 2011 IST
Dear Members,
SaiRam!
We had an unscheduled interruption on the portal today that lasted for around 5 hours. This was due to our secondary backup process exhausting our allowed disk space limit allowed on the server.
We have an aggressive back-up policy that creates a back-up of the server itself on a daily basis and as an additional measure the database and uploaded data are backed up on a regular basis (files have a weekly interval and database is backed up in whole every 24-hours) on the server and offsite too.
Normal service was restored at around 6:30 PM IST 31st October 2011 and we are glad to inform you that there has been no data loss or other problems. This was a new situation and a learning experience for us. We are taking steps to avoid such an event from repeating in future.
We regret the downtime and any inconvenience caused. Please let us know if you have any questions by writing to us at admin@saistudents.org or by using the ‘Contact Admin’ dropdown under the Help menu.
Delivering you a high quality experience through the portal is our priority and we remain focused on that. We are grateful for your patience and understanding.
With all our Prema,
Sai Students Portal Team