At Monad, we are regularly making behind-the-scenes improvements to ensure our infrastructure provides your team with the fastest, most secure and most reliable foundation possible. While most of these are invisible updates, we want to bring your attention to a substantial change we are about to make with a major upgrade to our hosting environment, which may require input from system users. Whenever we make changes under the hood, our goal isn’t just to replace ageing functionality like-for-like; it’s to use the opportunity to revisit best practice guidelines and modernise our entire stack for the future.
Why now?
Some of our core servers are currently running Windows Server 2016, which reaches its official end-of-support in January 2027. Rather than doing a simple straight replacement, rebuilding our infrastructure right now allows us to deliver a far more modern, secure and performant hosting setup across the board.
What are the changes?
At its core, this project is about futureproofing Monad’s infrastructure to give your organisation total peace of mind:
- Bringing hosting home to the UK: Our current production environment is in AWS eu-west-1, physically located in Dublin. When we originally deployed, UK-based hosting did not yet exist, and although GDPR parity has been maintained since Brexit, hosting inside the UK is now preferable. So, we’ll be moving our production environment from Dublin to London (eu-west-2), placing your data directly inside the UK, delivering optimal latency and cleaner compliance for our UK client base.
- Enterprise-grade security: We are replacing single-subnet networking with a dual-subnet topology, isolating public services on an external subnet while shielding internal databases and systems inside a strictly controlled private subnet when we rebuild in the UK.
- Uninterrupted stability: Rebuilding and modernising ahead of vendor end-of-life timelines ensures smooth operations well before January 2027.
As with every update we make, these improvements are designed to give your venue maximum stability and performance without disruption.
Rebuilding the Monad Hardware Interface Tool (MHIT), previously known as the Monad Client
Before we migrate our hosting servers, we need to restructure how local box office devices talk to our platform. Currently, the MHIT connects directly to an internal API, the same API used by our web servers. Moving our internal systems into an isolated, ultra-secure private network means local hardware will no longer communicate with this internal endpoint directly. To support this, we are rewriting the MHIT from the ground up, so it interacts with a dedicated, public-facing REST service and XMPP messaging server.
Note on online-only / MOTO (Mail Order, Telephone Order) operations: If your organisation processes transactions exclusively online or via Mail Order / Telephone Order (MOTO), i.e. without local ticket printers, chip-and-pin readers or barcode scanners, you won’t require any changes or updates. This tool upgrade only applies to organisations operating local box office hardware.
What’s new in the MHIT?
Because we are rebuilding the tool, we are taking the opportunity to pack it with improvements to make day-to-day box office management much easier:
- Server-managed configuration: Device setup is moving from the local client machine to an intuitive web-based interface in your Admin Application’s Settings Module, drastically reducing the need for manual configuration or remote support calls.
- Automated client logging: Diagnostic logs will now upload automatically, allowing our team to troubleshoot hardware issues instantly without asking you to locate and send files manually.
What happens next?
- MHIT Rollout: The Monad Support Team will work directly with organisations using on-site box office hardware to install and configure the updated MHIT software.
- Infrastructure Rebuild: Once the updated tool is deployed across local hardware, we will construct our new UK-based hosting environment.
- Database & DNS Migration: Once fully tested, we will update DNS settings and migrate databases over.
We do not anticipate any downtime outside of standard scheduled maintenance windows during this migration.
The Big Picture
Taking a step back, this project is about far more than server maintenance; it’s a proactive step to ensure your box office operates on a faster, more resilient and future-proof foundation.
By relocating our production stack from Dublin to London, we are bringing your data home to the UK, ensuring optimal speed and simplified compliance. Upgrading to a dual-subnet architecture shields internal databases behind strict private security layers, while modernising well ahead of vendor timelines eliminates operational risk long before January 2027.
As with every update we make, these improvements are designed to maximise performance and security while keeping your day-to-day operations running seamlessly.
If you have any questions about the rollout or want to check if your venue’s hardware setup requires an update, please get in touch with our team at support@monadticketing.co.uk, we’re always happy to help!