We are pleased to announce that our second data centre went live a few days ago. The addition of a second redundant location for our web service will help us maintain our perfect 100% uptime record. We are very proud of our uptime record and are not going to let it slip easily!

To provide a home for our second web service location, we have selected the Amazon EC2 cloud. The flexibility of the EC2 gives us the ability to easily scale our capacity to meet growing demand as well as seasonal fluctuations. Adding or removing EC2 instances can be actioned in a matter of minutes and provides a very cost effective method to adjust our server resources as needed.

At the same time, all our DNS hosting has been switched to the Dynect Platform from Dyn Inc. Dynect will help us to make the most out of our two autonomous data centres by providing load balancing and fail over. Under normal conditions the DNS responses will be evenly split between the IP addresses of our two locations. In case of failure at one data centre the Dynect Load Balancing system will direct all requests to the other IP address.

We recommend that all our clients use the URI pcls1.craftyclicks.co.uk to access the web service in order to benefit from the fail over protection. Accessing the web service directly via the IP addresses is possible, but not recommended.