Website Downtime & New VPS!

As you are all aware, flyukva.com has experienced some downtime Monday 8th Jan - Wed 10th Jan. Explained below is the reason why.

On Monday evening, the MySQL service on our VPS hosted with PIPEX went down. After several VPS reboots and attempts to restart the service we were unable to restart it. This meant that everything on the website using MySQL did not work, hence the reason there were MySQL errors displaying on our main page. The majority of our website requires MySQL to be running in order to access databases.

For the rest of Monday evening our web & systems development team were trying to find a way to restart the MySQL service and resolve the problem, we were in contact with PIPEX (VPS hosting provider) who informed us that our support request would have to be sent to their data centre as they could not help us and this would take time. In the past it has taken a number of days to receive any support emails back from PIPEX so we made the decision we would move to our new VPS which was setup by our new hosting company  Monday evening (PowerVPS located in America). Due to the fact the MySQL service was not working on our PIPEX VPS we were unable to back up our databases in the normal way and had to find an alternative method to make sure we did not loose data, this took time and delayed the VPS move further.

On Tuesday we were working to transfer all files and databases to the new VPS, this was more or less successful apart from a few minor problems. The website was up and running again Tuesday evening however some users could not see the website, others could. We later realised that there was a problem with the nameservers (which point the domain flyukva.com to look at the new VPS instead of the old one).

The issues with the nameservers were resolved Wednesday lunchtime and all users can now view the website. More or less all aspects of the website are now fully functional, up and running.

The only two areas we have had major problems in is our live suppport centre, which we are currently working to re install and re configure, and the other is flight manifests. Unfortunately there has been a problem uploading the correct version of flight manifests to the new VPS, and as a result the flight manifests are not working and will be looked at later this week.

As this message is posted, we are still working to ensure everything is working properly, please bear with us, @flyukva.com email addresses have not been setup again yet, the FlyUno and SkyHigh websites have not yet been transferred to the new VPS but will be later this week.

As a result of the VPS move we also have a new Teamspeak IP: 69.65.97.53 (or you can use flyukva.com instead of IP)

Our FS HOST multiplayer server is online on our old VPS using the IP: 212.241.205.55

The FS HOST server will continue to run using the above IP until the end of the month when the IP will then change to the new IP: 212.241.205.55  (or you will be able to use flyukva.com instead of IP)

We apologise for the inconvenience caused, it is just as frustrating for us as it is for you and we thank you for your patience.

As of yet, we have received no reply from PIPEX regarding the MySQL service on our now old VPS which means we were right to make the decision to move VPS rather than waiting on PIPEX as our website would still be down if we hadn't moved.

We were planning to move VPS, but just not yet, so this VPS move came out of the blue therefore that is the reason why there was no prior notice. Considering everything that has happened, I think we have done extremely well to move VPS and restore all website and systems within 3 days of them going down. Hopefully our new VPS will be more reliable than the last.

The monthly payment for our new VPS is payed from the Fly UK PayPal account, thanks to Andy Parish from FlyUno for donating to cover costs for our first month. The cost is £35.00 per month and anyone wishing to contribute to paying for our new VPS can do so via making a PayPal donation (see support us page under corporate). If wish to donate via another method, please contact chris.sutcliffe@flyukva.com All donations made to use will be used to pay for our VPS.

There were talks of us buying a dedicated server box, at the moemnt this has been put on hold after discussions with other ICT professionals to determine if  actually a dedicated server box would be the best solution for Fly UK. For now we will continue to host on our new VPS.

Apologies once again, but its now business as usual!

Kind Regards.

Chris Sutcliffe - Fly UK CEO