[bitfolk] Datacentre move - advance notice of short expected outage in December or January

Dear customers, == TL;DR - Our colo provider is moving out of Telehouse to another datacentre close by, and we are going to be moving with them. - It will mean one short (2h or less) outage for each of your VMs as our servers are physically moved on multiple dates (to be decided) in December and January. - Nothing about your service will change. IPs, specs, prices will all remain the same. Our colo provider will retain the same transit providers and will still peer at LINX. == Background Since we started in 2006 BitFolk has been hosted with the same colo provider in the same datacentre: Telehouse London. Telehouse have decided to not renew our colo provider's contract with them and so they will be moving almost all of their infrastructure to another datacentre; the nearby IP House. https://www.ip-house.co.uk/ Given that we have much less than a single rack of infrastructure ourselves, our options here are to either move with our current colo provider or find another colo provider. Staying exactly where we are is not an available option. In light of the good relationship we have had with our colo provider since 2006, we have decided to move with them. This must take place before the middle of January 2024. == Planning At this early stage only broad decisions have been made. The main reason I'm writing at this time is to give you as much notice as possible of the relatively short outage you will experience in December or January. As soon as more detailed plans are made I will communicate them to you. As soon as the infrastructure is available at IP House we plan to move some of our servers there - ones with no customer services on them. We will schedule the physical movements of our servers that have customers VMs on them across multiple dates in December and January. As IP House is only about 500 metres from Telehouse, we don't expect an outage of more than about 2 hours for each server that is moved. If you can not tolerate an outage like that, please open a support ticket by emailing support(a)bitfolk.com as soon as possible. We will do our best to schedule a live migration of your service from hardware in Telehouse to hardware in IP House, resulting in only a few seconds of unreachability. You can contact us about that now, or you can wait until the exact date of your move is communicated to you, but there are a limited number of customers we can do this for. So please only ask for this if it's really important to you. If it is, please ask for it as soon as you can to avoid disappointment. == Answers To Anticipated Questions === Will anything about my service change? No. It will be on the same hardware, with the same IP addresses and same specification for the same price. We're aware that we're well overdue for a hardware refresh and we hope to be tackling that as soon as the move is done. That will result in a higher specification for the same price. === Will the network connectivity change? No. Our colo provider will retain the same mix of transit providers that it currently does, and it will still peer at LINX. === When exactly will outages affect me? We have not yet planned exactly when we will move our servers. As soon as we do we'll contact all affected customers. We need to co-ordinate work with our colo provider who are also busy planning the movement of all of their infrastructure and other customers, and installing new infrastructure at IP House. We expect there to be several dates with one or more servers moving on each date. All customers on those servers wil experience a short outage, but in total we would expect only the one outage per VM. === Will I be able to change the date/time of my outage? No. As the whole server that your VM is on will be moving at the specified time, your options will be to either go with that or seek to have your service live migrated ahead of that date. Please contact support if you want one or more of your VMs to be live migrated. If you have multiple VMs on different servers it is possible that they will be affected at the same time, i.e. if the two servers that your VMs are on are both to be relocated in the same maintenance window. If that is undesirable, again one or all of your VMs will need to be live migrated to servers already present in IP House. === What is live migration? It's where we snapshot your running VM and its storage, ship the data across to a new host and resume execution again. It typically results in only a few seconds of unreachability, and probably TCP connections still stay alive. More information: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore == Thanks Thanks for your custom. Despite the upheaval I am looking forward to a new chapter in a new datacentre! Andy Smith Director BitFolk Ltd -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting