draft mail announcement for shared customers

Staff Staff
1

Dear Customer,

In an effort to bring more services and features to our clients we will be performing a major control panel upgrade starting 12:00 AM EDT (GMT-4) on Friday, October 5th, 2007. We will be performing this maintenance in order to offer the users more control of the services and selection of features. Here the Control panel will be upgraded to Hsphere 3.0 Patch6.

New features that will be made available are:

  1. Possibility to tag an email as virus according to the attachment’s MIME Type:

  2. Better mailbox list navigation in user control panel.

  3. Possibility to add sub-FTP accounts for Windows right from control panel (Chargeable at $1 per sub-FTP account per month).

  4. Possibility to switch asp.net versions right from control panel on Windows based hosting accounts.

  5. Possibility to switch PHP versions (PHP4 and PHP5) right from control panel on Windows based hosting accounts.

  6. Major improvement in Windows Shared SSL implementation making it much more stable.

  7. Even more selection in One-click installer (EasyApp) for Linux hosting accounts.
    Below guide lists the options that will be made available:
    http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/easyapp/index.php?v=2.04

    However this feature may take time to be available since it need MySQL upgrade that will be done separately.

Major points to be noted here:

  1. Chinese Language for control panel interface will no longer be supported as Psoft has not updated its package to be compatible with the new release.
  2. No new Catch All mailboxes will be possible. Existing mailboxes will continue to run as is.
  3. Postmaster and webmaster mailboxes will carry a different behavior after this upgrade.
    Below guide lists them (Section - “Postmaster and Webmaster”):
    http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/user/mailboxes.html
  4. MySQL DBs will remain on version 4.0.26 for now and we will be upgrading DB servers for MySQL 4.1 one by one. There will be a separate announcement made for this, along with the possible schedule.

All customers are requested to ensure their applications are compatible with MySQL5.0.
Please refer to below official MySQL guides for your reference:
(a) If your clients created databases/tables/fields in the tables with specific charset, please refer to the following documentation:
Character set upgrade - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset-upgrading.html
Connection Character Sets and Collations - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset-connection.html

(b) To understand the changes when DB is upgraded to MySQL5.0, please refer to below guide:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/upgrading-from-4-1.html

Important- If you are running any readymade application or installed is from the EasyApp collection, please update it to the latest release to avoid MySQL database version compatibility issues.

  1. EasyApp collection will be disabled for this time and enabled at a later date, once all our MySQL servers are atleast running MySQL4.1.

Downtime details:

Control panel will be down for upto 48 hours.
Estimated Webservice downtime is 30 minutes to an hour per Linux webserver.
There will be no downtime for any MySQL or PostgreSQL database during the upgrade.
MySQL Upgrade will not be done at this time but separately, upgrade Schedule for which will be announced shortly.

During this control panel upgrade there will be multiple phases.
The first phase being the control panel server itself, this will involve the control panel services being completely down for the period of the upgrade. Linux web, mail and VPS services will be updated during this period.

The next phase will be server upgrades of windows servers and MS-SQL Servers.
We will strive to keep all outages to as minimal as possible, but 3 hours time is to be expected during the permissions changes, there may be some slightly longer than this but we will provide updates as frequently as possible on our support forums for each server as we upgrade.

All updates for this process will be made available on this support forum thread:
http://support.jodohost.com/showthread.php?t=10925

[Note - Do read above thread for complete details of this upgrade]

Before this upgrade commences, we will be updating all our Windows and Linux servers to the latest OS patches.
You can find the schedule for reboots on below support forum threads:
For Linux Servers - http://support.jodohost.com/showthread.php?t=10927
For Windows Servers - http://support.jodohost.com/showthread.php?t=10928

And this is not all! We will be adding a new Coldfusion MX7 server by end of November.
Don’t feel left out, we will be offering “free account move” to this new server once the new server has been setup. Stay tuned to our support forums for updates on this or keep in touch with tech support.

For any possible issue/feedback/suggestion from you,We have created thread for discussion with our support staff or other customers for their inputs:
http://support.jodohost.com/showthread.php?t=10926

Our goal in this upgrade is to bring as many new features as possible, but in a manner with the least impact on your site and business ventures.

Regards,
Customer support