Background
Since 2010 our hosting partner has been a York based company, Bytemark. We’re planning to move to a new host based in Cambridge, called Mythic Beasts. Our infrastructure will remain in the UK.
How does this affect me?
If you have one or more domains, which you “self manage”, ie you pay for annual registration, which may include email services, we will ask you to update some settings. Otherwise sit back for now, we’ll give you the heads up when we plan to go ahead. We’ll ask you not to perform updates on the day itself.
And how do I do that?
Changing the IP address in your DNS management area is generally easy, provided your registrar allows this. We’ll notify you nearer the time when we have reserved the new IP address and the migration date is set. The first step will be to alter the TTL setting to 300, which means the updates will propagate within 5 minutes of the switch.
I am totally lost already and not at all confident about changing these settings by myself !!!
Don’t panic, in many respects it is better if we have direct access to the registry, contact us by email. That way we can make the changes for you and reduce downtime. If we need to, we’ll raise any support tickets directly with your registrar.
Will there be any downtime?
In the past we have managed server transfers and upgrades, every couple of years, but within a single host. We will advise nearer the time how much downtime to expect, suffice to say we’ll try and keep it the minimum – and provided we have unfettered access to the DNS, it can be as little as a few minutes. Any questions, like: which domains are affected, feel free.
Image: By Jeremy Keith (Flickr: Device pile) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
