As some of you are aware of, there is currently a major hurricane swirling around in the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane is expected to make landfall later tonight or early tomorrow morning around the Houston, TX area. We do not have any servers located in Houston, but we do have servers located in Dallas, TX which is about 250 miles Northwest of Houston. We are not expecting any major issues with this storm. The storm is expected to weaken quickly once it makes landfall. Dallas will probably see some rain and maybe some thunderstorms, but we are not expecting any major problems. The datacenter is equipped with backup generators, so in the event of power loss the backup generators will kick in and run the datacenter.

Obviously our foremost concern is with the people in the path of this storm and those that may be affected by the storm. Hopefully the storm will weaken further before it makes landfall and not cause much damage.

We will continue to monitor the situation. We just wanted to let everyone know that we are aware of the situation and to let everyone know that the datacenter does have measures in place to guard against problems like this.

Steven

As was mentioned in a previous post, PHP 4 officially went end-of-life on Friday, August 8. This means that the PHP designers are no longer going to be issuing bug fixes for PHP 4 and it is effectively a dead language at this point. The PHP designers did release PHP 4.4.9 on Friday, which a culmination of all the outstanding bug and security fix in the PHP 4 branch. For more information on this see the PHP website.

Because PHP 4 is now end-of-life, users that are still running websites that require PHP 4 really need to be switched to PHP 5. We will be checking all of the servers to find out what accounts are still using PHP 4 and you will receive a notice concerning this. If you are running a script that still requires PHP 4, the first thing you need to do is check to see if you are running the most recent and up-to-date version of that script. Keeping your scripts up-to-date is important from a security point of view because it helps to prevent your website from being hacked and defaced. If you are running the latest version of the script and it still requires PHP 4, then you need to discuss this with the developer of the script. PHP developers should be aware that PHP 4 was going end-of-life this year and should have been making arrangements to resolve any issues with their scripts. Personally, I would think twice before trusting a script from a developer that was unaware of the PHP4 end-of-life issue.

We wanted everyone to be aware of this. From a security standpoint, we have to enforce the security models that are advised from the PHP designers. The PHP designers are saying that everyone should move towards PHP5. While we are not going to be cutting off access to PHP4 any time soon, it does not mean that we will continue to offer PHP4 indefinitely. Arrangements need to be made that adjust your scripts to work with PHP5.

Steven

It has been a relatively quiet 2 months at AMS. We have been working on some of the backend systems, testing some new systems, and making plans for new offering.

We rolled out updated versions of cPanel last month. This update went smoothly and allowed us to test some new updating procedures which proved to be much more efficient. The cPanel updates are done to insure server security and to also bring you new features.

We have also been working on updating Apache on all of our servers. We are still in the process of completing this task, but we only have a handful of servers left to upgrade. All of our servers are now running Apache 2.2, it is just a matter of upgrading the servers to the latest version of Apache 2.2.

With mentioning Apache, I should also mention that the PHP designers are readying PHP 5.3 to be released this fall. Currently all of our servers are running PHP 5.2.6, the latest version of the PHP 5.2 release. We will be updating our servers to PHP 5.3 once it is released and goes through a testing period. For more information on PHP 5.3 see the PHP website.

With that being said about PHP, we do still have a few accounts that are running PHP 4. PHP 4 is losing support from the PHP designers tomorrow (August 8, 2008). I will be running through the servers in the next few weeks to find out which accounts are still running PHP 4, and what adjustments they have made to their scripts in order to get them ready for PHP 5. If you have not already done so, you need to be looking into leaving PHP 4 and moving to PHP 5. I will not be able to support PHP 4 indefinitely and soon you will have to move off of PHP 4 and onto PHP 5. Again this only affects a small percentage of our accounts that have been set up specifically to run on PHP 4. If you have made no such request to our support team, then your account is running on PHP 5 and is not affected by this.

Most of the tasks that have been completed lately have only affected the backend of the servers. Server optimization and more efficient models. I wanted to update everyone on what we have been doing to provide you a better webhosting experience.

Scott

A new update to cPanel has been released by the cPanel developers. This update includes a few minor changes, but again the main advantage is in terms of performance. I have just updated one of our test servers to this new version of cPanel to try it out and I have seen a very significant improvement in terms of performance.

We will be working with this test installation throughout the week with an eye towards updating our production servers perhaps as early as next week. I am also following some leads from others in the cPanel community regarding some problems with the update. The developers are working on these issues as they are made aware of them, but the issues are very minor. Still I would like to be sure that there are very few, if any, known issues regarding this update before applying it to our production servers.

For end users, this update will not incur any downtime to your account and the update will go smoothly. The main thing you will notice is an increase in response time and performance on your account.

We wanted everyone to be aware of these changes.

Steven

We have received a small number of issues being raised about slowness and sluggishness of accounts during the late night and early morning hours. This is due to the backup process that is running on all of our servers. Our backup process runs during these hours because it makes more sense to run the backups during the time when the servers are less active. The servers receive fewer visitors during the overnight hours than they do during the daytime hours.

All of our servers run a nightly backup process to back up accounts. Most of the servers split this task up throughout the week in different methods. We don’t specifically advertise our backup system because we feel that in doing so users will be less inclined to keep their own backups. It is always a good idea to have your own personal, up-to-date, backup of your account! The backups that we created are intended to be use in disaster recovery, for example a hard drive failure. But again, you really should not depend on us as your sole backup, you should have a personal backup copy of your website stored on your personal computer.

With all of that being said, I have made some adjustments to the way that the backup process runs on all of our servers. I am going to try out these changes for about a week and see if there are any noticeable performance gains or any problems.

Scott