[General] New Year Happenings

I hope everyone had a fun and safe holiday season. The year end holiday season is always interesting because you spend a lot of time with family and friends over the course of two or three weeks and then as the new year turns over we have to get back into our normal routine. We at AMS have been working on some changes to be made in the year 2009.

First, let me point out that the MySQL 5 upgrades have all been completed on our shared hosting servers. This upgrade went very smooth, with just a couple of incidents and problems surrounding the upgrade.

Next on our list of things to do is a full phase-out of PHP4. All of our servers are running PHP5 by default and your account is using PHP5 unless you have specifically written in requesting your account to use PHP4. PHP4 officially went end-of-life on August 7, 2008 with the release of PHP 4.4.9. This is the last PHP4 release. Any account that is still using PHP4 really needs to be updated to PHP5. We will be compiling a list of accounts that are still using PHP4 and sending out notices to those accounts sometime in January 2009.

We are also bouncing around an idea to start a new blog which focuses just on script updates. Internal discussions regarding this seem to indicate that this would be very useful for our customer base. This will be a way for us to inform our client base about new script updates, so that they can be made aware of them and apply the updates to their account. The discussion now is just on how best to set this up and what scripts to monitor. We won’t be able to monitor every script for updates, but hopefully some of the more popular scripts. Please feel free to send us comments or feedback concerning this.

We have spent the past several weeks doing a lot of upgrades to our internal computer systems. This is completely separate of our webhosting servers and did not affect any of your hosting accounts. These upgrades include a slight overhaul to our internal billing system and other workstations. These upgrades are still ongoing but we hope to have them completed within the next couple of weeks.

The big project that we will be working on this year consists of an upgrade to a few of our servers. Over time newer technologies become available. Faster, bigger servers become available. In order to insure that our servers stay up-to-date with these new technologies we like to keep our servers updated as much as possible. Our server updates consists really more as a server migration. We bring a new, bigger, faster server online and move your account over to this new server. Doing these types of upgrades on the same server that your account is currently on really isn’t possible, due to changes in the hardware and the resulting operating system changes, not to mention the downtime that would be necessary to perform these levels of upgrades. By moving your account to a newer and better server, we keep a full abort system in place, the old server stays around for a few days just in case problems are encountered. We have done these type of upgrades and migrations before and they all have gone very smoothly. Not all of our servers will be upgraded, some of our servers were upgraded just last year using this same procedure. Look for an e-mail soon as we begin these upgrades.

This is an overview of what has been happening at AMS and what some of our early plans for 2009 are. We hope that 2009 brings you a lot of prosperity and also a lot of fun too.

Scott