Our hosting provider will be migrating our site to a new server on March 5th, 2020. There will be a temporary service interruption during that time. Please read on for detailed information.
Dear all,
Our hosting provider, SiteGround, just informed us that they will be migrating our site to a new server on the night of March 5th, 2020. Since this is a server migration that is not managed by us we have minimal control over the timing and the process. Unfortunately, this means that there will be significant service disruption during the server migration window which could affect you as well.
The server migration will take place on the night between March 4th, 2020 and March 5th, 2020 GMT. During that time we need to make sure that there are no changes to our site as they will not be transcribed to the migrated site. Moreover, our site will be completely unavailable for approximately 40' during the migration window.
For all intents and purposes, the migration window we are working with is March 4th, 2020 22:00 GMT to March 5th, 2020 06:00 GMT. During that time there will be significant service disruption on our site.
If you are trying to download or upgrade our software's Professional editions you might be unable to do so.
Taking backups which are uploading the backup archives to Box.com, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Storage, OneDrive or pCloud may fail to upload the backup archives during the migration period. As noted in our documentation, access to these storage providers requires your site to contact a service on our server first. We recommend that you do not take backups which are uploading to these storage providers during the migration window.
Our site's IP address will change after the end of the migration window. In many cases we had asked you to ask your host to whitelist our site's IP address in their firewall for backups to work IF AND ONLY IF your backups are set up to automatically transfer the backup archives to Box.com, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Storage, OneDrive or pCloud. You might find your backups suddenly failing to transfer the archives after March 6th. If this is the case please ask your host to update their firewall exception with our site's new IP address -- we will update this page with the new IP address on March 6th.
You will not be able to purchase a new subscription or renew an existing one during the migration window. Our sales system will remain closed throughout this time period. If your subscription is expiring soon please renew it now. You will get the same renewal discount and you will not lose any subscription time.
Recurring subscriptions set to renew on March 5th may behave erratically up to 24 hours after the end of the migration window. Our reseller, Paddle, will charge you correctly. However, the payment notification may never reach our server if it's sent during the migration window. We will be doing a manual collation of recurring payments on March 6th; your subscription will not be lost. You may, however, receive an erroneous email about your subscription expiring. If you do, please ignore it.
Our Contact form may fail to work properly. Your message may appear as sent but we may never receive it. Please do not use the contact form during the migration window.
Our Support ticket system will be completely shut down during the migration window. You will not be able to submit new tickets or reply to existing ones.
While you will still be able to log into our site, any changes you make to your user account during the migration window might be lost upon migration. This includes the following items:
- User profile information (name, email address, ticket system signature)
- Two Step Verification options
- Cookie acceptance preferences
- Data processing options (GDPR consent page)
- Account termination (exercising your "Right to be forgotten" under the GDPR)
We kindly request that you do not make any changes to any of these items of your user profile during the migration period to avoid any problems.
Moreover, we have to push back all of our scheduled releases by several weeks. Our immediate focus shifts from working on new features and bug fixes to preparing for the unscheduled server migration and being at the ready for any issues which might arise. Combined with other scheduled obligations and holidays we have to revise our software release schedule. We understand that this runs against what we've told some of you in our support ticket system. Please understand that the release schedule change was precipitated by an event which is entirely out of our control. If you were affected by a bug already fixed in a development release please keep using that development release for a few more weeks. If you were waiting for a feature that you had requested we apologize for the additional delay.
We had originally scheduled the release of new versions of Akeeba Backup, Akeeba Solo, Admin Tools and Akeeba UNiTE for the week of February 24th to 28th. These releases have been pushed back for the week of March 16th to 20th at the earliest.
A major new version of Akeeba Ticket System was scheduled for release on the week of March 16th to 20th. Its release is now scheduled for May 4th to 8th at the earliest since there's Easter and inelastic conference engagements which collide with earlier dates.
Development and updates to our other, lesser used, Joomla extensions which were scheduled for mid-May to mid-June are temporarily put on hold with no scheduled release date.
We would like to apologize for the short notice and the fact that such a disruptive migration takes place on a busy weekday. Since the migration is mandated by the hosting provider we don't have much of a choice there. We will be working nights and weekends to make sure that any disruption is isolated during the migration window only, to the extent that's humanly possible.
Thank you for your understanding and patience.