WHMCS recently released version 6.3 of their popular WHMCS billing software. I know a lot of our users depend on this software for their web hosting business. I thought now would be a good time to review the end-of-life status for various WHMCS version.

First, a primer. Why is end-of-life important? As software developers work on adding new features and optimizing code for a program, over time the core of that software may need to be replaced. To put it simply, this is what WHMCS 6.3 represents, a new core. Now, developers cannot continue to update cores for various other releases forever. So the amount of time that a software core remains active and able to be updated is called that software’s lifetime. Eventually those softwares reach their end, called their end-of-life. If you use a piece of software that is end-of-life, essentially you are using a version of the software that will never see updates again. This means that major security holes can be disclosed for those versions, and the developers aren’t going to fix it. Depending on end-of-life software puts your account, and potentially your customer’s data at risk.

WHMCS is currently supporting 4 different versions. From a developer’s standpoint, that’s a lot of software cores to keep safe and secure. The oldest of these cores – WHMCS 6.0 – is set to go end of life on July 31, 2016. If you are using WHMCS 6.0 you need to be aware of this and making plans to upgrade to a newer version.

A look at the current (as of April 8, 2016) WHMCS version makeup:

WHMCS Release Tree	Latest Version	Expected End-Of-Life
WHMCS Version 6.0	6.0.4	July 31, 2016
WHMCS Version 6.1	6.1.2	September 31, 2016
WHMCS Version 6.2	6.2.2	December 31, 2016
WHMCS Version 6.3	6.3.0	Unknown

IMPORTANT NOTE: – If you are using any other version of WHMCS, for example WHMCS version 5.3.14, then you are using an end-of-life version of WHMCS and may be vulnerable to security threats!

To upgrade WHMCS, you may need to contact your license vendor. That would be whoever you purchased your WHMCS license from. You may also find the information on WHMCS’s site to be useful for upgrading.

Matt
AMS Support

Joomla! recently released Joomla! version 3.5. All Joomla! users are encouraged to update. The most noteworthy improvement includes the ability for Joomla! to email website administrators and inform them of new releases. For a complete list of improvements see:

For those updating Joomla! from Joomla! 3.4 to Joomla! 3.5, you will need to use the Joomla! Update component to perform the upgrade. Information on that component can be found here.

Additional upgrade information can be found at:

J3.x:Upgrading from Joomla 3.4.x to 3.5 – Joomla! Documentation

Chris
AMS Support

AMS Computer Services is proud to introduce our new Semi-Dedicated hosting service.

What is semi-dedicated hosting? To illustrate this, think of an entire dedicated server as a pie. All hosting accounts, shared, resellers, dedicated are hosted on a dedicated server it’s just a matter of how big that server (or pie) is. On typical shared hosting as many accounts as possible are pushed onto a server, meaning that each web hosting account gets a very, very small slice of that pie. With semi-dedicated hosting, the focus is on fewer accounts per server, and thus each account gets a larger piece of the pie.

A lot of our customers have asked for this. Wanting something that gives them more resources than a typical shared hosting account but without the infrastructure and licensing costs involved with a VPS. This is where semi-dedicated hosting comes. More account resources, better hardware, faster access all at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated or VPS server.

Have more questions about our semi-dedicated? We have a list of frequently asked questions or simply contact us for more information.

Head on over to our Semi-Dedicated Hosting page for more information.

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Faster website load times, better website performance, more account resources. Try our semi-dedicated hosting service today!

John
AMS Sales

The Joomla! developers have released an updated version of their Joomla! script, Joomla! 3.4.6

Joomla! 3.4.6 Released

This release fixes a major security bug in Joomla!

This security bug is also present in prior Joomla! releases, Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 2.5. But since Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 2.5 are end-of-life, no security patches are being released for those versions.

Users on our servers that have been using these outdated Joomla! versions have been sent several notices about this. Because of these notices and this recent security issue, this may be the final nail in the coffin for Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 2.5 scripts. We will likely have to start disabling Joomla! scripts that are end-of-life. We apologize for having to do this, but advice to upgrade your Joomla! scripts have gone ignored and the dangers of allowing these exploitable scripts outweighs any benefit from a server security standpoint.

If you are not using Joomla! 3.4.6, please upgrade as soon as possible

Steven

Beginning on Tuesday September 22nd we will begin upgrading all of our servers to using PHP 5.6 by default. PHP 5.6 is the latest supported version of PHP from the PHP developers and making this change will allow us to continue to operate on a supported version of PHP.

We anticipate completing these changes across all of our servers around October 15th. Essentially this means that we will be switching servers to PHP 5.6 by default between September 22 and October 15 as time allows. Some days we may switch multiple servers, other days we may not switch any servers. This is just the operating window we are looking at.

Our servers currently run PHP 5.4 by default. PHP 5.4 technically went end-of-life on September 3, 2015 meaning that it is no longer supported. Our intention isn’t to fully drop support for PHP 5.4 yet, but the move to PHP 5.6 will allow us to wean customers off of an unsupported version of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 support will continue to be available, at least through the end of 2015 and perhaps longer. We’ll just have to see how the adoption of PHP 5.6 carries on.

We will also be running PHP 5.5 on our servers, but we are skipping ahead and going straight to PHP 5.6 by default.

If you need PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5 on your account, just shoot us a support ticket and we’ll be happy to switch your account over to either PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5.

What does this change mean for me?
For the most part, you likely won’t notice any changes from upgrading to PHP 5.6 from PHP 5.6. People who develop web applications like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal have known about PHP 5.4’s death for some time and have released updated code to act accordingly. Reputable programmers who write plugins, components, and themes for these web application have also known about this and have long ago updated their code. So as long as you are running up to date scripts and plugins/themes/components you won’t notice any changes.

If you are a PHP programmer yourself and have custom written all of your code, then you have likely stayed in the loop regarding PHP’s versions and are aware of PHP 5.4’s death. You have probably update all of your code to facilitate these changes.

For those that want a more in-depth look at this, a list of deprecated function in PHP 5.5 include:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.deprecated.php
ext/mysql
preg_replace() /e modifier
datefmt_set_timezone_id()
datefmt_set_timezone()
mcrypt_cbc()
mcrypt_cfb()
mcrypt_ecb()
mcrypt_ofb()

Deprecated functions in PHP 5.6:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.deprecated.php
always_populate_raw_post_data
iconv.input_encoding
iconv.output_encoding
iconv.internal_encoding
mbstring.http_input
mbstring.http_output
mbstring.internal_encoding

Steven