Director's Report: DEBRIEF PART 2: Technical Details
and the Future

(Updated: Friday 5th March 5:00PM)
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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.
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