Hello All

Just thought i'd share with you all some of the things that are planned for early 2009 here at HRMSAces...

For sometime now we have been unhappy with the quality of service being provided by our hosting company. In the 4 years this site has been in existence we have seen a 50% increase in the annual hosting and domain renewal fees but the quality of service and support (when needed) as increasingly fallen short of what we would expect for the costs.

Indeed in the last 12 months alone we have experienced 2 major unplanned outages, 1 (thankfully) failed hacking/hijacking attempt, and have seen unprecedented levels of spamming against the mail server.
If it was just this site that was affected then we could possibly live with it, however the server that we rent also hosts a number of other web-sites (including paying clients) and these too have suffered reliability issues during this time.

Following a chance meeting with an old lag at the UK Oracle User Group meeting earlier this month we have been put onto a new UK-based hosting company that could be our saviour.
Initial discussions have ensued and it looks likely that we will be changing hosting company early in the new year.

What does this mean to you all?
Well in order to try and make the move as seamless as possible we will be establishing one of the ‘spare’ domains with the new hosting company. The idea will be to set-up a new install of the HRMS Aces forums and then perform a full export/migration of the existing system across to this new system. We will then set-up a redirect of the existing URL’s to this new URL and then actually move the domain registrations across.

The first part is easy, the second part trickier and the last part will just be plain painful (anyone who has ported a phone number or home broadband service across to a new provider will have experienced something similar).

The upshot will be that (a) we will suffer some downtime, which will be notified well in advance, and (b) we will be changing URL names.

We will publish further details once we have established a timetable from the new hosting company. Our aim is to have everything completed by Easter 2009 (which is mid-April).

Other than that, I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, a prosperous new year, and thank you all for simply being part of HRMSAces.

The first step in the "grand design" is taking place...

Unused by most (if not all) of you, the hrmsaces.eu domain will be temporarily decomissioned in readiness to move across to the new domain registrar.

If you are one of the very few that has actually been hitting this site via this domain then you are likely to loose your connection very soon (as soon as the DNS updates take place) - in which case you should switch to the .co.uk or .com domains as soon as you can.

Regards

Admin