I would like to apologise to all my customers again for all the problems with web hosting recently over the past few days, the web hosting company I use to manage my web hosting emailed me late on Wednesday evening instructing me that they were switching the software behind their web hosting from CPanel to Plesk due to changes to the CPanel licence which CPanel have changed from being per a server to per a user, this has left many web hosting companies facing massively increased costs and has been causing quite a lot of annoyance in the webdesign industry as absolutely no-one in the global web hosting industry saw this coming. (see https://www.stephenphillips.co.uk/cpanel-price-increases-september-2019/ for more information)
It was this change which has caused all these problems, literally overnight my hosting company changed the DNS servers they use and instructed me to update to new ones for all the clients I host, and then it seems they decided to turn off the current CPanel servers and attempted to use backups to set them up fresh on Plesk.
This was handled incredibly badly by them and I have told them this, normally I would expect a decent period of notice to prepare and take backups before such a change which they did not give me, instead effectively turning off all my websites overnight in one move.
As a result websites were offline for a short period which was picked up my website monitoring system early, however in the case of many of my clients this change led to their website showing an “invalid SSL certificate” error for a while as the change resulted in the web hosting provider needing to issue a new SSL certificate too.
I only got access to the new Plesk Server control panel on Saturday morning (28th Septemeber 2019) in order to let me log in and have now been able to make the changes I have made to fix things to make it work today after first spending time investigating what was wrong too.
It seems my web host had used backups from the previous cPanel server to setup the new Plesk server and had not setup several clients websites correctly on the new server which resulted in things such as them not setting up databases for the websites and caused several websites to appear broken and have errors, along with the above SSL issues as well.
All websites are currently up and working now, and hopefully this will be the end of all of these problems, I will continue to monitor the situation closely, I thank for you continued understanding and patience yet again.