« ans02.midphase.com | Home | ans02.midphase.com »

Planned Upgrades - Beginning November 1st

By Marc Bollinger | October 12, 2007

What are we doing?

We’re currently in the process of making some upgrades and changes to our hosting servers. For the most part, these won’t be noticeable to you or affect your hosting with us. However there may be a few exceptions.

The first and biggest item is our current rollout of PHP5. PHP4 is End of Lifed by the PHP Developers themselves. This comes after 2-3 years of them saying “Hey guys, get ready for this!” and so now, the time is upon us. After December, only security updates will be applied for PHP4. This means that you’re going to see a lot of new code come out taking advantage of features only available in PHP5, which won’t work on PHP4 at all.

Most properly written PHP code should port over to 5 without a problem. However, there is a still a plethora of code in production that will require some attention.

At this time, the first thing we suggest is to upgrade your applications! This will be the quickest/easiest fix, and will be the first thing our support technicians suggest. If you’re still having issues with your application, it may be time to look for a replacement that does the same thing. There are still PHP applications being used that have had their development cease completely. These are the applications that will eventually cause problems. Since PHP applications are popular, finding a suitable alternative (and more current) application shouldn’t be too difficult. If you need some suggestions, visit our forum and ask! (www.midphasetalk.com)

Next, we’re going to be implementing PHPSuExec on all of our servers which will enhance the security of scripts being executed on our servers (such as a PHP script or application). PHPSuExec works by modifying the execution user to match your user, instead of everyone sharing the common “apache” user, for example. Basically, it will allow for tighter control over executed scripts to prevent others from “snooping”. This change will also help us track resource utilization to enhance the stability of our shared server environment.

We are also upgrading our cPanel 10 machines to cPanel 11 in order to provide extra functionality, security and pave the way for some really cool future upgrades! We’ll provide more information about this important change once details become available.

Timeline:

We’ll begin upgrading our shared servers on November 1st. We will only be upgrading 2 or 3 boxes at a time in ensure quality in our en-devours. We will announce specific server upgrades several times before the upgrade window commences.

If you have any questions about anything mentioned above or if you have no idea what any of this has to do with you, please do not hesitate to contact our support department (support@midphase.com) or sign up on our midphasetalk.com community and ask!

As always, we appreciate your business and hope that these changes will enhance your service with midPhase.

Topics: Service Upgrades |

Comments are closed.