Migration to AWS on 17th February, at 5am.

We will shortly be migrating our web services to a new data center. This data center is provided by Amazon Web Services, and provides a fantastic infrastructure for us to manage our existing customers, and grow bigger for faster access around the world.  

On February 17th, at approximately 5am NZ time, we will be planning a 1 hour outage during which we are migrating our core web services over to Amazon Web Services data center in Sydney. We expect no down time to websites, but there will be a short duration at that time when you won't be able to edit your website via the CMS. Also, any orders that are received during that time, may be disrupted. You will get email notifications in any case, so you can still fufil your orders. 

After the migration we will still be providing NZ based web hosting via our CDN service, with 2 locations in NZ, and several more server locations around the world. Only the CMS and database will be located in Sydney. The speeds across the tasman to AWS are fantastic, and you should not notice any issues. If you have A-Records pointed at our old NZ web hosting location, you don't need to worry, because we will still be mirroring all websites from that location. 

The benefits of the move to AWS include almost unlimited storage for email and web servers. We will be better positioned to restore data deleted more than a day ago. We will be able to automatically provision almost unlimited numbers of servers in the event one of our customer websites gets hit with a denial of service attack, or just experiences a short term high traffic load. Most importantly, we will be saving electricity by running less servers during quiet times. 

Considerations of the move to the AWS Sydney data center means that your websites need to comply with NZ Law that governs us, Australian Law that governs the data center and USA Law that governs Amazon the owner of the AWS. It should be noted that from time to time we are asked by government authorities to provide data as per authorised "production orders" or "court orders". The change of server location has not been made for this reason, but depending on your own business, you may wish to consider that your data is now accessible by 2 additional government juristrictions. We have no desire to host websites that do not comply with the laws of all those juristrictions, nor any website that does not comply with our own terms and conditions.