Mail / DNS Server Upgrade As many members have noted, the performance of our hosting mail server has been poor recently with a number of behavioral quirks as a result. To facilitate better reliability and performance for the foreseeable future, we have scheduled a major upgrade to all components of the mail server, including hard drives, RAM, and operating system.We have done preliminary hardware preparations to ensure that the downtime is minimal, but due to the scope of changes, the outage will be substantial. The upgrade process will be as follows:At 1:00 AM US Central Time on Friday, March 20th, all services including SMTP, POP3, IMAP and webmail will be taken offline. At that time, the new server will be configured with all services disabled and we will begin a final data migration process which is expected to take between 2 and 4 hours to complete. Once the migration is completed, we will do final software configuration and testing and services will be brought online one at a time as they are verified.In addition to being the shared hosting mail server, this server also provides primary DNS as "ns1.steadfast.net" or also known as "ns1.simgames.net." Backup DNS will be provided by "ns2.steadfast.net" (also known as "ns2.simgames.net") during this time, but you may experience some slowness in resolving domains during this maintenance. DNS will be the first service to be brought back online as soon as its information is migrated.Please be aware that while we do not anticipate any complications, it is possible that this process may result in the reappearance of email that was already deleted, or duplication of delivery of some messages. It should not result in lost messages, though mail delayed during the outage could take several hours to reach its final destination. No incoming or outgoing email will be able to be processed during the maintenance.This outage will not affect web sites or databases in any way, and control panel service will remain available.We expect that the maintenance will be completed by 6 AM and that all services will be fully online at that time. If you have any questions, please contact support. More...
