[General] Current Happenings

I was taking a look at the calendar the other day and realized that the holiday season is really upon us and the end of the year is not too far away. I would like to get a few things accomplished before the end of the year and begin looking at some other changes on into next year. I have to walk a fine line between keeping the servers up-to-date in terms of what the webhosting community is offering and making sure that the upgrades can be offered in a seamless manner.

To that end, below is a list of upgrades and additions that I am looking to have accomplished or researched by the end of the year.

· Script Installation Service – This is an idea that we have been tossing around for some time, we just weren’t sure if it would be feasible to offer. We’re still not sure if this something that will see wide-scale use or really what will become of the offering. The only way we are going to really see how something like this would be used is to make it available and evaluate its status.

We seem to be seeing a lot of issues where end users are installing scripts on their website and then never updating them. New versions of scripts are generally released to fix a security issue within the script. The security issue may be small or large, there’s no real way of knowing, but in any case the only way to avoid complications caused by the security issue is to keep the script up-to-date. For whatever reason, it seems that end users are not keeping their scripts up-to-date.

To help combat this problem, we are considering a Script Installation Service where our administrators would install a script on your account, catalog it, and stay up-to-date with script updates. We are still working out all of the specifics in regards to this project, I would stay tuned to the blog for a more formal announcement concerning this.

· PHP 5 Upgrade – All of our servers currently support both PHP4 and PHP5. PHP4 is the default PHP used on all of the servers. This means that if you have any .php file it is being processed as PHP4, unless you have written in with specific instructions to use PHP5 by default. PHP4 is going end of life according to the PHP developers and the GoPHP5 initiative has set a February, 5th 2008 deadline for major script developers and service providers to drop support for PHP4. We intend to honor this and make PHP5 the default offering on our hosting plans. This will basically entail swapping the default structure of PHP on the servers. Instead of PHP4 being the default, PHP5 will be the default. If you specifically need PHP4, you can submit a support request and we will have PHP4 turned back on for your account.

It is our hope to begin switching servers over to a PHP5 by default setting sometime in early December and we hope to have the process completed by the end of December. We will likely do this switch in a phase-in procedure, we will first do this switch on a couple of servers and evaluate the procedure based on feedback from that test. Should there be major problems concerning this switch, we will not hesitate to switch everything back to PHP4 and then re-evaluate how we are going to lay this out.

The GoPHP5 initiative and the PHP developers are correct, PHP 5 has been released for over 3 years now and it is time for widespread adoption of PHP 5. PHP developers cannot continue to support an old and outdated language framework. Like it or not, the Internet is ever changing. PHP version 6 is already being talked about, and the Internet community has yet to see a widespread adoption of PHP 5.

Will upgrading to PHP 5 break your script’s functionality? I can’t say for sure. The vast majority of popular scripts have been updated within the past 3 years and those developers are aware of PHP5. You can check the GoPHP5 website for a list of projects that support PHP 5. Just because a script is not listed does not mean that it will not work with PHP5. If you are unsure, you should contact the developers or vendor of the particular script you are using and ask them if the script will work with PHP 5. If it does not work with PHP 5, you should inquire as to why this is the case. PHP 5 is coming whether the developers like it or not, the web hosting community cannot continue to support old and antiquated frameworks forever.

· Apache 2.2 Upgrade – This is a project that will not get completed before the end of the year and the timetable for the upgrade may be more Spring ’08 than early 2008. However I did want to mention it here as I’m sure there are a few users that are interested in this upgrade. Apache is the service that serves up webpages on the server, in affect it is the web server.

With the release of cPanel 11 this past summer and fall, cPanel now supports the newer Apache trees including version 2.2. Our servers are currently running the Apache 1.3 tree and are serving us very well. Apache 2.2 mainly includes a lot of code fixes that can improve overall performance of the server and just like PHP, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Apache developers to justify supporting the Apache 1.3 tree. We don’t want to be left so far behind that we receive an end-of-life statement regarding the Apache 1.3 tree and then have to scurry to upgrade our servers to a newer version of Apache.

Our Apache setups contain a little bit of custom work done by our server administrators, so translating all of this over to Apache 2.2 will take some time. We want to develop a procedure to where we can easily migration from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.2 with as little downtime and as little affect on our end users as possible. Right now I don’t have a solid timetable for when this upgrade might be done. I would like to have it in place by the Spring of 2008, but we are just now getting to the point where we can perform test upgrades on our test servers. While I still think that a Spring ’08 timetable is very feasible, it could be postponed.

We have some other upgrades and new features that are also being planned but these are the main things that we are focusing on. Our aim has always been to give our users the best webhosting experience in terms of stability, security, usability, and features. We look forward to continuing to offer you this same webhosting experience throughout 2008 and the years to come.

Scott Mutter
Director of Administration