Status of PHP 4

Hey everyone,

Notice is currently being sent out to all customers regarding PHP 4. In the near future, we will be removing PHP 4 from our servers. The PHP development team officially ended support for PHP 4 on December 31st, 2007 and security updates ceased in August of 2008. We have continued to support PHP 4 well past that date as an option to our customers so they may have some additional time to update their software for PHP 5 compatibility.

Although we do not yet have a firm date for this change, we wanted to give you advance notice so that you can take some time to check the compatibility of your software to ensure it will function properly with PHP 5 (the current default). Once we have a firm date for when this change will be made on your server, you will receive another email notice closer to the removal date with that information. Once PHP 4 support is removed, any scripts that require PHP 4 will no longer operate on our server.

To check if your site will function with PHP 5, simply remove the following line from any “.htaccess” files on your account to immediately switch to PHP5 (warning: doing so may cause your site to break if it’s not compatible):

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know!

State of Site5: May 2012

It’s State of Site5 time again!

Here’s a sampling into what we have been working on:

• India hosting has been launched!
• Phoenix, Arizona hosting will be coming soon!
• MySQL 5.1 has been deployed to all servers.
• We will be performing the first migration of a central mail server back to localized email services next week. More servers will be done in the coming weeks!
• Softaculous has been rolled out to all reseller servers at this point, and deployment to shared servers will be starting in the next few weeks.
• Work is ongoing on our internal billing system. Progress is definitely picking up, and we’re getting excited about the release later this year!
• We are up to over 100 servers on R1Soft’s CDP3 platform! We will continue to move servers from CDP2 to CDP3 until all have been moved. This improved our restore times plus a zillion other improvements.
• An internal application has been released to our staff that allows our team to perform more advanced tasks for customers in a more automated fashion. This should help to speed up support even further as we add more options to our tool framework.
• Our Knowledge Base is ever-expanding to include new articles and tutorials. If you have any suggestions, let us know!

Have suggestions for a new location? Have a question about something we’re working on? Just want to say hi? Post in the comments! Thanks for your continued business and support!

Bash to be default shell on all accounts

Hello!

We are in the process of switching all user accounts from the current jailed shell over to Bash shell. Bash shell provides for better compatibility for your installed scripts and applications, and eliminates issues often presented with jailed shell when compiling software and libraries locally to your account.

If you have any questions, or notice any problems at all, please submit a ticket to our support team.

India Hosting Now Available!

I am pleased to announce that we have added India as an option for shared, reseller, and VPS hosting!

As with our other location options, there are additional costs. These costs are as follows:

• Shared Hosting – $1 more per month
• Reseller Hosting – $2 more per month
• VPS Hosting – Varies (please see the VPS page for pricing information)

If you are interested in having your existing account migrated to a new location, you can fill out the form located in Backstage and our migrations team will be happy to take care of this for you. There is a one-time fee of $5 for us to migrate an existing account.

This link can be used to test a download from a server located at our India location. You can use this to determine how fast file downloads could be if you host from India.

India Test Download Link (30 MB file)

Use this IP address if you would like to see latency or trace information: 109.73.173.2

If you have any suggestions for locations, please let us know in the comments!

MySQL 5.1 Rollout

Hello!

We are in the process of rolling out MySQL 5.1 to all of our servers! We are sending notifications to all customers informing them of the scheduled maintenance for their account this week, so be on the lookout!

If you’re not a developer and are worried – don’t be! You shouldn’t have any problems with this upgrade. If you have any concerns, feel free to contact our support team and we’ll be happy to discuss it with you.

For our developer friends, the three biggest new features for customers in our SiteAdmin/cPanel environment are listed below:

Views

A view is an alternative way to retrieve data from one or more tables. View is something like a filter that passes data from tables before user can see them. When user creates a view, data from tables are not duplicated. All view’s data are stored in tables from which the view is created. Work with views is the same as work with ordinary tables.

Triggers

A trigger is a stored procedure that is associated with a table and that activates when a user tries to insert, update or delete data into/from table.

Events

Events are tasks that run according to a beforehand defined schedule. When you create an event, you are creating a named database object containing one or more SQL statements to be executed at one or more regular intervals, beginning and ending at a specific date and time.

The above information comes to us from sqlmaestro.com. Be sure to check that site out for some great tips/tools!

MySQL.com’s docs on version 5.1 can be found here for those interested as well.

Again, if you have any questions regarding this upgrade, please do not hesitate to contact our support team!

State of Site5: April 2012

Happy Spring! Then again, here in Texas, it didn’t ever really feel like Winter! :)

Here’s a glimpse into what we’re working on:

• Brazil hosting has been launched!
• India hosting will be launching soon as well.
• We have started rolling out MySQL 5.1 to all managed servers.
• Our Softaculous rollout is still ongoing, and there’s been nothing but positive feedback at this point!
• Work continues on our internal billing system. New products such as unmanaged VPS will be possible once this project is completed late this year.
• Work is ongoing on our new DNS systems. As you can imagine, this is a highly involved project that we’re not rushing through.
• We will be exploring the possibility of changing our default PHP version to 5.3, offering PHP 5.2 and 5.4 as options, and removing PHP 4 support entirely.
• We expanded our telephone hours in the morning by 2 hours!
• Our Knowledge Base is ever-expanding to include new articles and tutorials. If you have any suggestions, let us know!

We’ve also added a 90 second video introduction for new Site5 customers to the homepage!

As always, if you have any questions please post in the comments. Thanks for your continued business and support!

New WordPress Theme: Prosume

Greetings!

We have released a brand new FREE WordPress theme entitled Prosume!

Prosume contains all of the features you come to expect from our themes:

• WordPress 3.0 Menu Management Support
• Easy to set up – Theme Options Page
• Clean, simple design
• Custom Widget Support
• Built with the Less Framework
• Customizable Logo
• HTML5 Inside
• Uses CSS3

Download Prosume or any of our free WordPress themes from our WordPress themes website!

Host in Brazil

I am pleased to announce that we have added Brazil as an option for shared, reseller, and VPS hosting! This provides us our first server presence in South America!

As with our other location options, there are additional costs. These costs are as follows:

• Shared Hosting – $1 more per month
• Reseller Hosting – $2 more per month
• VPS Hosting – Varies (please see the VPS page for pricing information)

If you are interested in having your existing account migrated to a new location, you can fill out the form located in Backstage and our migrations team will be happy to take care of this for you. There is a one-time fee of $5 for us to migrate an existing account.

This link can be used to test a download from a server located at our Brazil location. You can use this to determine how fast file downloads could be if you host from Brazil.

Brazil Test Download Link (30 MB file)

Use this IP address if you would like to see latency or trace information: 187.45.183.10

If you have any suggestions for locations, please let us know in the comments!