Moving datacentres – what’s next for 34SP.com

9 years ago, we moved our servers from the London datacentre we’d used for almost a decade, to one in Manchester. We did this to have them closer to our offices for the occasions when work is required and to move to a more modern facility.

After months of planning, we’re making a similar move again. Our servers will remain in Manchester, but for a number of reasons we’re moving them out of the facility we’ve used since 2010.

Most of the servers will be taken to Teledata, with some going to LdEX2. In time, this will allow us to offer services with geo-redundancy – the ability to function correctly even if an entire datacentre loses service. That’s something to look out for in the coming years but won’t be available right away. As an aside, both facilities offer carbon neutral power, in line with our sustainable hosting program.

When we started out in hosting, 100Mbps networking was the norm. Last time we migrated between datacentres, we took the opportunity to upgrade our network to 1Gbps. This move brings a similar chance to put new technology at the heart of our network. To date, only small parts of our network have been running at 10Gbps. As we commission the space at our two new sites, we’re installing newer and more powerful routers and switches, treating 10Gbps as the base speed – 100x faster than we had when we started hosting websites in 2000. We’ll also have the ability for core parts of the network to run faster than that, at 40Gbps and above.

Building on our experience of having moved between datacentres before, along with an extra decade of knowledge, we’re expecting this move to have little to no impact on the services you use on a day to day basis. We’ve worked hard over the past few months to ensure that all product types can be migrated with zero downtime, or as short a downtime as possible. Where we are able to make the move without downtime, you’ll receive an email when the move starts and another when it’s complete. For sites where a short period of downtime is unavoidable, you’ll be notified a week in advance of the move, before receiving those two emails on the day your site is moved.

That said, don’t panic if you don’t get these emails soon – we’re not rushing things and the whole process will take around 6 months to complete. If you’d like to discuss any aspect of this project, please don’t hesitate to send us an email and we’ll do our best to answer your questions.