The Spotlight website has been stable since 23.00 on Wednesday 24th August, with the exception of two brief and unforeseen outages (31st August, 09:10 – 09:28; 1st September 16:11 – 16:28), for which we apologise. We know many of you were inconvenienced by these.
We’ve been working closely with a team of experts to resolve our website issues and put measures in place to ensure they cannot happen again.
As part of this work we've added additional web servers to our configuration and will be implementing a better load balancing system with automatic failover capabilities. We've also fast-tracked the launch of a caching system designed to improve the website's performance, speed and stability.
We’ve learned a lot during the last two weeks. We now know that our main internet connection (ISP) is a potential single point of failure which we can’t control, and so our priority is to move the hosting of our website to an external, dedicated facility over the coming months. This will provide a more resilient arrangement, ensuring that we have additional internet circuits to fall back on, should one of them fail.
We are adding extra layers of automatic testing and monitoring to our systems, so that we’ll be notified immediately of any instabilities.
We also plan to have regular website maintenance slots so that we only make updates and changes to the website at times which will not impact upon your working day (e.g. late evening, weekends, etc). We will always give advance notice of any downtime required for maintenance, so that you can plan accordingly.
Finally, we understand that many of you were frustrated because no-one had told you what was happening or when we expected to be back online, so we’re exploring various ways to notify people early (email, SMS, twitter) and provide frequent updates if anything like this should ever happen again. In an ideal world, we will never face a similar situation; but we realise that communication is key in the event of any future issues.
(cross-posted from the Spotlight News blog at http://www.spotlight.com/news/)
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