3 new in last 7 days

02/09/2010
Attachment issues and delayed emails
[09.41] Yesterday evening one of our web servers partially failed and queued email instead of sending it out. The issue was repaired this morning. It is now clearing the queue and should be finished within the hour.

There were also some users experiencing problems with adding attachments. This was a related issue that has also been resolved.

31/08/2010
Service Down [Resolved]
[16.57] Some users may be experiencing issues logging into the service. We are aware of the problem, and are currently working to resolve it as quickly as possible.

[19:09] The faulty server was removed from the cluster and repaired. It has now been reinstated and the service should be operating as normal. Thank you for your patience.

31/08/2010
Website Slowdown [Resolved]
10:30: Dear Members - we are currently experiencing abnormally high loads on one of our servers. Service is operational but is performing very slowly. Please bear with us whilst we locate the source of the problem and restore service to normal working speeds.

10:50: We are aware that some logins are timing out. However we are close to resolving the problem in full. Next update within 15 minutes.

10:58: The majority of members will now be able to access the service. We pinpointed the problem on one of the storage service which will be remounted shortly. Update in 10.

11:15: The final server is still taking a while to come up. We are continuing to work on the problem. Will give another update in about 15 minutes.

11:40: Final server online and working. System will stabilise shortly. If you logged in and found your folders were all empty please login again now as this was simply due to the storage server coming back online and not able to show you your email at that moment in time.

06/08/2010
Intermittent Webmail Sending Email [Resolved]
We identified an issue with one of the webmail servers this morning that was causing it to queue email instead of sending it. The server in question has been rebooted and is now sending email correctly again. All queued email has since been delivered successfully.

If your email had been caught by this issue you would have received a warning email from the server stating that it had been delayed for 4 hours. All such emails have since been delivered however - there is no need to resend anything. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by the short delay in sending the email.

05/08/2010
Service Issue [Resolved]
15:35 - 15:50
A service issue affecting logins has been resolved. Apologies for the interruption, our monitoring systems picked up on the fault and alerted us to the problem immediately. The problem was resolved within a few minutes and the service stabilised shortly afterwards. Everything is fully online.

04/08/2010
New Packages Online
The new account packages are now live on the system and are available for purchase. If you have purchased an email subscription since 1st May 2010 you are entitled to a free upgrade to the new equivalent package. We will release details soon about how to go about this.
30/07/2010
New Email Packages
As previous announced on our accouncements page we have some new package types launching shortly. These changes will be launching now on Tuesday 3rd August, not on the 1st August as originally advertised.

As before, anyone subscribed to a package from 1st May 2010 will be entitled to a free upgrade on request to their nearest equivalent package.

27/07/2010
Service Interruption [Resolved]
[15:15] The mail servers are in the process of being rebooted to solve the current service issue (15:00 onwards)
We should have the service restored shortly.
[15:30] Interruption still ongoing, mail clients are able to connect/retrieve email however webmail is offline.
[16:00] One of the storage servers has been found to be unresponsive.
[16:10] If you visited the site between 16:10 and 16:50 you would have reached a holding page. We purposely took the websites offline to reduce the load on the mail servers whilst the problematic storage server was fixed.
[16:50] Service fully online.

19/07/2010
Intermittent Weekend Service Issues [Resolved]
01:30 - Dear Members - we've had the odd report of page timeouts or other server errors over this weekend. We've identified a possible problem system account causing these problems and have fixed it. If you are still experiencing these issues please contact the helpdesk (help@aluminati.net) and if possible include the server information which appears below your folder list.
16/07/2010
Service Issue Followups [All Resolved]
After the issues caused by the webserver an hour ago we've had to restart several other backend services between 16:00 and 16:45. You may have experienced issues during this time as individual servers were rebooted, although interruptions should have been minimal due to other servers taking over the load during each reboot.

We are no longer tracking any issues on the system.





System Status
03rd Sep @ 23:10
  • Incoming Mail
  • Web Access
  • Client Access
  • Hosting Service

Service Status
This page shows a realtime display of our server infrastructure, green dots indicating an online server whilst a red dot indicates a server that is currently unavailable.



Infrastructure Explained
Our service is configured to utilise multiple redundant servers for critical services. Each box in the diagram is a logical grouping of servers that are able to 'fail over' to each other. As long as one server within a box is available, the service as a whole is available.

Coloured Groupings Explained
To make it easier to visualise our infrastructure, we have colour coded various blocks to highlight their roles in handling your email.

  • Yellow
  • This area handles incoming email, usually reaching one of the 'AV/GreyListing' gateway servers first followed by one of the spam firewalls. Once scanned at both stages your new email is delivered to one of the mail servers.
    In the event the 'AV/GreyListing' servers are busy, email is delivered instead to any of the 'Backup MX' servers who deliver your email onwards as soon as they can.

  • Blue
  • This area is the core of the service, the mail servers are the servers you connect to when reading your email whilst the mail storage servers are simply huge storage arrays where all the email is stored.
    Nightly backups of email on these arrays are made to 'Mail Backups'.
    'Web Service' is responsible for any web based service in particular the website and webmail whilst 'Database Service' stores everything required by various other stages of the service.

  • Green
  • This final area is the part of the service that handles your webhosting account if you have an applicable hosting subscription.
    'FTP Service' lets you update your website whilst 'Hosting Service' provides website access to your visitors.

    Online Times
    We also show you how long each server has been online for (where data is available) in minutes, hours or (far more likely!) days. This lets you see if a recent problem you think might have been service related was or not by seeing if a server (or block) came back online around the time of your issue.

    Offline Servers
    If you do see a red light you can rest assured we will be informed immediately. Our systems are all fully automated and continually check each other (and from external sources) for availability. The instant a problem is detected that individual server is removed from the cluster and service continues. Servers will have routine maintenance performed on them from time to time and you will always be warned if any maintenance causes outages (but not if it will not affect overall service functionality).

    In addition we sometimes take servers out of the cluster for extended periods of time or new servers that are being prepared for addition to the cluster may appear here before they are actually used. In these cases the server will appear here with a red dot for an extended period of time although there is no need to worry of course as these downtimes are intended.