We have completed two rounds of testing the PHP5 roll out and the number of problems that have been encountered is just too negligible to count. To put things in perspective, the test servers resulted in about 3000 accounts being upgraded and there were about 3 problems of differing severity levels. Because of this, I feel confident that the rest of our servers can be upgraded without any problems.

I am planning to initiate the upgrade of the rest of our servers next week over to a PHP 5 by default set up. I don’t have specific dates for each server, and I’m also not sure if all of the servers will get done next week. I do hope to get the majority of them upgraded next week. The timeframe I am looking at is from December 17th through December 20th. I am not going to upgrade any servers to PHP5 through the Holiday weekend of December 21st through December 26th.

Hopefully all of the servers will be upgraded between December 17th and December 20th of next week. But a lot of the action required depends on other factors that may surface during that time period.

At any rate, I wanted you to be aware that this upgrade is being scheduled, and the same principle still applies as was on our test servers. PHP4 will still be available, so we can switch your account back to PHP4 if needed. The argument still applies that if your script or account will not work with PHP5, then you need to investigate why this is the case. I don’t have a problem with running your account as PHP4, but you have to understand that we cannot support PHP4 indefinitely. If your script will not work with PHP5, then you need to raise this issue with the developers of that script.

Thank You
Steven

The second set of test servers have been successfully switched over to PHP 5 by default. Users that were affected by this were sent an e-mail last week concerning this upgrade.

If you experience any problems at all with the new PHP set up, please let us know.

Thank You
Steven

We have sent several notices out the past few weeks and a lot of those are being bounced back to us, saying that the e-mail address is invalid. I am going to be going through the system in the next few weeks and removing these e-mail addresses from our billing system, because if they are no longer active addresses, then we don’t need to be writing them.

I am asking everyone to please be sure that your contact information with us is up-to-date.

If you update your contact information in your control panel, that does not reach our billing system. The control panel contact information system is a completely different system than our billing contact system. Please be sure that your contact information is up-to-date with our billing system as this is the information we use to contact you.

We also received some auto-responders stating that your e-mail address has changed. This might be good for casual contacts, such as friend or relatives, but we need to be able to verify that you are who you say you are before we can update the contact information. Otherwise anyone would be able to change the contact information on your account. To change your contact information with us, you need to follow our procedure for updating this information.

To update your contact information please use the appropriate link at our Account Management area:

http://amshelp.com

Click on the Update your Contact Information link to update your contact information.

If your contact information is not kept up-to-date, then we will have no way to contact you concerning issues regarding your account.

Thank You
Steven

We performed the PHP5 switch over on a couple of test servers earliest this week. Judging from the lack of response that we received concerning this move, we believe that the switch over went through real well. To be on the safe side we are going to do another round of testing. This time we are increasing the test servers to four test servers.

Users on those four test servers will receive an e-mail message shortly telling them that they are part of this upgrade. This second batch of upgrades will be done next week, December 10th through December 14th. As with the last batch, we hope to do the upgrade on Monday, December 10th, but that date is not set in stone and the date may be pushed back a couple of days.

Also, as with the last upgrade, if for whatever reason we receive concerns regarding the last upgrade or feel that this upgrade will cause too many problems we will postpone it. If we upgrade a server and receive a lot of issues on that server, we can always revert it back to PHP version 4.

A lot of information concerning the upgrade and switch over is in an earlier post. Please read that post for more information concerning this.

Thank You
Steven

The test servers have been upgraded to PHP5. Those accounts that were affected by this test (you should have received an e-mail if you were part of the test) are now running PHP version 5 by default.

If you encounter any problems at all because of this switch, please open a support ticket at:

http://amshelp.com

This will insure that our support staff receives your message.

Also, if you find out that you were a part of this test and you did not receive a notification, then your contact information is probably not up-to-date. You need to keep your contact information up-to-date and you can do that at:

http://amshelp.com

This test will last for at least the rest of this week. I am not yet sure when the next round of testing or the next set of servers will be upgraded. I am still waiting to evaluate this set.

Thanks
Steven