Why we’re moving our servers to the cloud

On 9^th November 2022, part of Milton Keynes was hit with a power cut. It took out our power for about 35 minutes, but our UPS kicked in and gave us enough time to down our servers.

I have to confess here that, had we followed our own advice and installed the latest generation of UPS, we could have pre-programmed an automatic shutdown procedure for the servers. So, had the power cut occurred whilst we weren’t monitoring our servers, we could have given ourselves some additional work restoring our servers to a working state.

To avoid the risks involved with any future power failures, we are moving all our servers to our data centre racks in Milton Keynes, and replicated in Maidenhead. The power in the data centres is fed from multiple sources and backed up by generators, so the likelihood of a power failure is extremely remote. Our servers will be much more resilient. Comms reliability and physical security are also much better in the data centre.

This will also save us having an air-conditioned room in our premises and they will be far more secure in our data centres.