We currently offer PHP versions 5.2.6, 5.2.17, and the 5.3 series. You can choose which version your account uses in the “PHP Settings” section of our “My Account” control panel.

PHP 5.2 has been obsolete for many years. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing PHP 5.2.6 from our servers and encouraging customers to switch to PHP 5.3. (PHP 5.2.17 is still available for now, but discouraged.)

This is unlikely to cause any problems for customers, but we’ll do it in several steps to ensure a smooth transition:

• Now: The default for new accounts, and for accounts that don’t currently use PHP scripts, has already been switched to version 5.3.
• Now through September 14: Existing customers using PHP 5.2.6 are strongly encouraged to switch to PHP 5.3.
• September 5: Running “/usr/bin/php” or “/usr/bin/php5″ from the command line (for example, from an ssh login or a cron job) will run PHP version 5.3 instead of 5.2. This change will not affect most customers, because it is unrelated to which version of PHP runs in response to Web requests.
• September 15 – October 14: We’ll identify existing customers who are still using PHP 5.2.6 and send e-mail notices asking them to upgrade.
• October 15 – December 30: PHP 5.2.6 customers who haven’t upgraded will be automatically switched to PHP 5.2.17 and notified of the change (we’ll upgrade a small percentage of sites each business day). Any customers who experience problems can temporarily downgrade to the old version while they work to fix their scripts.
• December 31: Nobody should be using PHP 5.2.6 any more. In January, we’ll contact any customers who downgraded and make sure they’re aware that they need to fix things right away.
• January 31, 2013: PHP 5.2.6 will be completely removed from our servers. Any customers still using it will be upgraded to 5.2.17.
• Early 2013: We’ll also begin supporting the PHP 5.4 series.

If you’re still using PHP 5.2.6, you should take a moment to upgrade as soon as possible. While it’s unlikely that it will cause any problems, it’s wise to review your site after any change. If you use the control panel to upgrade PHP yourself, you can make sure it happens when you have time to look things over, instead of on a random day before December 30.

If you’re an existing customer using an older version of PHP, we haven’t yet changed your PHP version. However, we will begin doing that in about 30 days (we’ll announce that separately), so we recommend that you upgrade now. That way, if you find you’re using an outdated PHP script that isn’t compatible, you can set PHP back to the previous version and work to update the script. The old PHP 5.2 series will be removed from our servers by the end of 2012.

FastGCI and eAccelerator are now the default

With this version of PHP, we’ve redesigned our systems to use FastCGI and eAccelerator by default. This provides a performance boost without having to manually enable these features, as was previously required. We’ve also provided new control panel options allowing customers to disable FastCGI or eAccelerator in the unlikely event they cause problems. (We haven’t seen a problem with any script newer than about five years old, so it makes sense to enable it by default now.)

Easier editing of php.ini

We’ve also added a new control panel feature that allows advanced users to edit “php.ini” settings without using FTP or the command-line shell. In addition, php.ini changes now take effect instantly, even under FastCGI, because we gracefully stop any running PHP processes for your account whenever the settings are changed.

Technical tweaks and improvements

Before we switched to this new version of PHP, we made a list of the difficulties that customers tended to report with previous versions. Based on that, we’ve tweaked several things to avoid problems and misunderstandings:

• We don’t use the “optional N argument” for session.save_path any more, avoiding incompatibilities with scripts that incorrectly treat that setting as a raw file path.
• We switched to the bundled version of PHP’s GD library to avoid the “missing imagerotate()” problem that sometimes forced people to install an extra WordPress plugin.
• If you place a “php.ini” file in the same directory as a PHP script, the extra settings will be appended to the master php.ini settings, instead of erasing the master settings. This prevents odd warnings that MySQL is not enabled if you use a php.ini file taken from a Windows server.
• You can now enable ionCube Loader by simply checking a box in the control panel, just like Zend Guard (aka “Zend Optimizer”).
• We’ve changed the way we internally manage PHP code so we’re no longer tied to the Debian Linux PHP release schedule. This lets us offer feature updates more quickly, and will allow us to introduce simultaneous support for the PHP 5.3 and 5.4 series in the future.

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions or problems.

Update: Shortly after posting this, the PHP developers released a new version and we updated PHP to version 5.3.16.

Due to unrelated network outages at the old data center, we accelerated the original schedule mentioned in that post. Almost all customer sites were moved by October 7, and the remainder (a small handful of customer sites that needed manual intervention due to old software that was incompatible with the Debian Linux software update) were moved as of October 18. Everything is, and has been, working normally.

I want to again take the time to apologize to our customers for the service interruptions that occurred because of the original power problem and the later network problem. They weren’t acceptable. We know you count on us for your success, and we’re constantly working to improve reliability.

For most customers, these changes will be completely unnoticeable. However, a very small number of customers might notice software differences or experience up to five minutes total of “downtime” at some point. We recommend reading through this entire post for details.

• Linux software upgrades
• Hardware upgrades
• Data center reliability improvements
• Will there be any downtime?
• Will anything else change?
• Have questions?

Linux software upgrades

First of all, we’re updating the software on all our Web servers, which we do every couple of years. Our servers use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, which releases new versions from time to time (just like Windows or Mac OS X).

Earlier this year, Debian released version 6.0 (aka “squeeze”), so it’s time for us to upgrade. This will make sure we can continue to use Debian security updates to keep our systems safe, and will give customers access to newer versions of some programs. Among the many updates:

• The Apache Web server will be upgraded from version 2.2.9 to 2.2.16
• The MySQL database server will be upgraded from 5.0.51a to 5.1.49
• The Perl scripting language will be upgraded from 5.10.0 to 5.10.1
• The default version of the Python scripting language will change from 2.5.2 to 2.6.6

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that these are not the newest, “cutting-edge” versions available. This is intentional; the philosophy of Debian Linux (and of our hosting platform) is to only use extremely well-tested, tried-and-true versions. We strongly value stability over new features, within reason, because that improves reliability for the majority of our customers.

However, we want to emphasize that these versions also include security updates from later versions — for example, Apache includes the features from 2.2.16, but also includes security fixes from versions 2.2.17 through 2.2.21.

By the way, we’re intentionally not changing the version of the PHP scripting language with this upgrade. We’ll be introducing the newer PHP 5.3 series as a separate future update to minimize the number of changes that occur at once.

All modern software scripts you may have installed on your Web site should be compatible with the update. As always, using the latest version of any software you’ve installed is the way to ensure that your site is secure and doesn’t experience any compatibility problems. If you’re using an outdated version of a script you’ve installed on your site and you’ve been putting off an upgrade, now is a great time to take care of that.

Hardware upgrades

We’re also finishing a years-long project to replace older servers with newer, more powerful hardware. Most sites are already hosted on newer servers with dual quad-core (8 CPU) Xeon processors, 16 GB of RAM, and a solid state drive in the RAID array providing MySQL database storage. After this upgrade, those are the only hosting servers we’ll have, so all our customers will see the fastest possible site performance.

Data center reliability improvements

We’ve been using the same primary data center (the building that stores most of our physical servers) for more than ten years, with generally good results.

Earlier this year, though, that data center had several electrical power problems that caused unacceptable interruptions in service. While it’s been stable for a couple of months, the data center engineers failed to convince us that problems can’t recur.

We have business relationships with several data center companies, and as a result of these problems, we’re now using a different building as our primary data center. Our own site and recently opened customer sites are already located there; older sites are being “migrated” as part of the changes mentioned above.

The data center is managed by CoreSite, a large company with an excellent track record. The facility was originally designed for telephone company service, which has the highest power availability standards in the industry. In addition, the data center is the home of MAE-West, one of the largest Internet traffic exchange points in the world. This gives us a wider choice of network providers and peering connections to make sure we can continue to meet the growing bandwidth demands of modern Web sites.

We’re confident that this will allow us to provide the reliability you expect and need for your Web site and e-mail service.

Will there be any downtime?

With these changes, we’re “migrating” Web sites to upgraded servers. We do this using the same well-tested procedure we’ve always used to move sites when we need to balance server loads or retire obsolete hardware; it allows us to move most sites “live” with no service interruption at all.

If you have a very large, busy MySQL database, though, your site may be unavailable for a few seconds — or even a few minutes in the worst case. That’s because the migration process works like this:

1. It first copies all the files and databases for a site to a new server.
2. Next, it queues incoming connections so that they don’t reach the old server. This is done in such a way that Web browsers won’t see any error messages if the following steps finish quickly.
3. It then re-copies any files or databases that changed since step 1.
4. Finally, it routes the queued connections to the new server.

For most sites, the amount of data changed in step 3 is small: it completes in a second or two, so any visitors to the site at that moment would see nothing but a short delay in loading a page.

But if you have a large database that’s constantly changing, the migration may need to copy over an entire database again in step 3. On average, this takes about 10 seconds per 70 MB of database tables, so if you have a very large database, the delay can be long enough that some visitors might see “timeout on server” errors before step 4. The largest database we recommend is 2 GB (2000 MB), so the worst case is about 5 minutes of unavoidable downtime. (This is still less than the downtime that would result if we upgraded the Linux software “in place” on the existing servers, as we used to.)

We automatically move sites with large databases outside of normal business hours (usually between 9 PM and midnight Pacific time) to minimize the impact. However, if your site has databases over 100 MB in size (most don’t) and you’d like us to migrate your site at a time when you feel the site traffic is slower, don’t hesitate to contact us. We can also display a custom “this site is undergoing maintenance” type of message during the migration if you wish.

Will anything else change?

One other thing we should mention for technically advanced users is that the IP address of your site will change. However, this won’t cause any problems, because we update the DNS entries for your site as it’s migrated. We also “proxy” any connections that arrive at the old IP address so that the DNS “time to live” doesn’t cause any issues.

(This is why we insist on handling the DNS nameservers for sites we host, even though we have to turn away some business as a result. When we manage the DNS entries, we can make sure you won’t experience downtime if your site’s IP address changes.)

Have questions?

Please contact our support team if you have any questions. We appreciate your business!

Most customers shouldn’t use IPv6 yet, and if you don’t know what it is, you can safely ignore this post. But if you’re familiar with IPv6 and interested in adding it to your site, this post explains what you need to know.

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is a new way of making Internet connections.

Most computers on the Internet use “IPv4” connections, which have been the standard for about 30 years. Until recently, “the Internet” mostly just meant “computers with an IPv4 address that are able to make connections to any other computer with an IPv4 address”.

Unfortunately, IPv4 has some problems. The biggest problem is that there are only about 4 billion IPv4 addresses available, which isn’t enough to connect every computer that wants to be on the Internet in the future. Almost all of those 4 billion addresses have been used or reserved.

Internet engineers recognized this problem more than a decade ago and created IPv6, a new standard with many more addresses. There are enough IPv6 addresses to give trillions of them to every person on the planet. (IPv6 has other technical advantages, too.)

IPv6 is slowly being added to existing computers so they can use both IPv4 and IPv6. These computers will have two separate addresses: an IPv4 address that looks like “192.0.2.1” and an IPv6 address that looks quite different, such as “2001:db8::1:2:beef”.

When two computers on the Internet both have IPv6 addresses, they can use IPv6 to connect to each other instead of using IPv4. In fact, Internet standards say that two computers with IPv6 addresses should always use IPv6. Eventually, every computer on the Internet will have an IPv6 address and every connection will take place over IPv6. IPv4 won’t be used any more.

That’s the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, adding IPv6 addresses to computers has been a slow process. There’s been no pressing need for it: since everyone on the Internet has an IPv4 address, adding IPv6 doesn’t give much of a visible benefit, and people frankly have better things to do with their time.

That changed in early 2011. IPv4 addresses really are running low now. It’s possible that within a year or two, some people connecting to the Internet won’t have an IPv4 address. They’ll only be able to make IPv6 connections, and if you want these people to be able to connect to your Web site, your site will need an IPv6 address.

We now support IPv6 as an optional feature for our Web hosting customers. It’s something you can turn on, but it’s currently not enabled by default.

Can enabling IPv6 cause problems?

Enabling IPv6 can cause problems. When you enable IPv6, we tell the rest of the Internet that computers should make an IPv6 connection to your site if they’re able to do so.

This doesn’t affect the vast majority of visitors to your site: most people only have IPv4 addresses and will continue to make IPv4 connections. The trouble is that a small number of computers on the Internet (perhaps 0.2%) think they can make IPv6 connections, but due to technical problems on their end, they really can’t. Because there aren’t many IPv6-enabled Web sites on the Internet, these people haven’t yet noticed that they have a general problem with their Internet connection. They just think that a small handful of sites don’t work properly.

If you enable IPv6 for your site, these visitors will see an error message and think your site is “down”. Because of this, you should enable IPv6 on your site only if you can tolerate having a small number of visitors unable to reach you. This is probably not a good idea for an e-commerce site, for example.

By the way, if you’re interested in finding out if your computer has this problem, there’s a Test Your IPv6 site that will check your connection. (Just so it’s clear, that site tests your own cable/DSL/dialup connection, not our servers or your site with us.)

Why would anyone enable IPv6 if it might cause problems?

The number of people with IPv6-only connections will slowly increase over time, and the number of people with broken IPv6 connections will slowly decrease.

Eventually there will be more people on the Internet with IPv6-only connections than people with broken IPv6 connections. Enabling IPv6 for your site will then result in more people being able to reach it without errors, not fewer.

We can’t predict when that day will come, and to some extent it depends on who visits your site. There will probably be more IPv6-only computers in China than in the United States, for example, so if your site is targeted at Chinese visitors, your site might see a benefit before other sites. For now, we’re letting individual site owners choose when and whether to enable IPv6.

What is “World IPv6 Day”?

Because of the problems described above, no large site wants to enable IPv6 before its competitors. For example, if Google enables IPv6, a small number of their visitors won’t be able to connect to Google any more. If those visitors try Yahoo instead and find that it works, they’ll switch to Yahoo and Google will lose lots of money. (Make no mistake: 0.2% of Google’s revenue is a lot of money.)

This problem has made Internet engineers enable IPv6 more slowly than they’d like to. Even though almost everyone agrees that enabling IPv6 on every Web site is a good idea in the long run, nobody wants to go first.

The solution to this is World IPv6 Day. On June 8, 2011 UTC (which is 5:00 PM Pacific time June 7), many of the largest sites on the Internet (including Google and Yahoo) will simultaneously enable IPv6 for 24 hours.

During that period, people using computers with broken IPv6 connections will find that they can’t connect to most large sites. The hope is that they’ll complain to their local network manager or ISP (who can fix it) instead of the people running the sites (who can’t). It’s a sort of “Mutually Assured Destruction” pact — World IPv6 Day will cause problems for a small number of people, but the problems won’t make Google look any worse than Yahoo, for example.

Tiger Technologies is participating in World IPv6 Day by enabling our own www.tigertech.net main site (but not any other URLs) for IPv6 during that 24 hour period. We encourage our more adventurous hosting customers to do so, too. The more sites that people with broken IPv6 addresses can’t reach that day, the more likely it is that they’ll realize the problem is on their end.

If you want to participate, you can either enable IPv6 support yourself during that period and turn it off afterward (by following the instructions below), or you can contact us at any time before June 7 at 5:00 PM Pacific time and ask that we enable your site only for World IPv6 Day. We’ll handle it for you.

How do I enable IPv6 for my site?

If you enable IPv6, your site on our servers will have an IPv6 address (in addition to the normal IPv4 address). Visitors using computers with an IPv6 address will then try to connect to your site using IPv6 connections.

You can enable IPv6 for your site using the DNS section of our control panel:

• Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
• Click Domain Name Options
• Click Edit DNS Zone
• Scroll down to IPv6 support
• Follow the instructions to enable IPv6 support

(If you want to disable IPv6 after turning it on, the same screen allows you to disable it.)

Is there anything else I should know?

Here are some technical details for IPv6 experts:

• We’re providing native, dual-stack IPv6. It’s not 6to4 or another tunneling scheme.
• All our servers have outgoing IPv6 support. They prefer IPv6 for outgoing connections to other IPv6-enabled sites as detailed in RFC 3484.
• If you enable IPv6, we allow incoming IPv6 connections on ports 80 and 443 (for Web sites) and on ports 22 and 23 (for ssh and telnet). We don’t currently allow IPv6 connections to any other ports or services.
• IPv6 is fully supported for SSL sites. Our Apache Web servers will recognize the IPv6 address of your site and choose the correct certificate to present to the browser.
• Each IPv6 site has a dedicated IPv6 address on our servers, and IPv6 reverse DNS for that address works correctly.
• Except for www.tigertech.net during World IPv6 Day, we aren’t yet advertising IPv6 AAAA addresses for any of our own sites. This is because we’re extremely sensitive to the reliability of things like mail service on mail.tigertech.net. We’ll make separate announcements on our blog about IPv6 for any other services in the future.
• While we consider IPv6 to be production quality on our end, the reality is that some of your site visitors won’t have reliable IPv6 connections on their end. If you have trouble as a result of enabling IPv6, you’ll probably need to just disable it for now.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

WordPress is a popular (and free!) way of creating blogs or “real Web pages” — it’s an easy-to-use, flexible “Content Management System”.

We recommend WordPress for most customers who want to create a site, but don’t want to install any software on their own computer. Just answer a couple of questions about where you’d like WordPress to be installed and whether you’ll use it primarily to make Web pages or blog posts, and the installer handles the rest — no need to upload files or create a database. Updates are simple, too, using the standard WordPress “Dashboard”.

So of you’ve been looking for an easy way to create a good-looking site or blog, give WordPress a try!

Today, we’ve added another option: you can optionally choose a “wildcard” AlphaSSL certificate instead for just $49.00 a year.

A wildcard SSL certificate works for your top level domain name (such as “example.com”) and every other single-level subdomain (including “store.example.com”, “internal.example.com”, “www.example.com”, and so on). The advantage is that you don’t have to choose the specific subdomains in advance.

Wildcard certificates are usually pretty expensive — it’s not uncommon to see them sold for over $200.00 a year — but we’re making them as affordable as possible, because we really think more customers should use SSL security on their sites. Because we’re not making a profit on the certificates themselves, they’re only available to hosting customers on our Gold or Platinum hosting plans.

By contrast, basic certificates only protect versions of your domain name both with and without the leading “www.” subdomain (e.g., “www.example.com” and “example.com”); they are still available for $19.00 if that’s all you need.

Getting a certificate

See our SSL certificate page for full details on SSL certificates. Customers can easily order them through our “My Account” control panel, and they will usually be installed within one business day.

What’s an SSL certificate? It activates the “padlock” icon for your site in a Web browser, showing that the connection is encrypted for security. You should use an SSL certificate if your visitors type sensitive data such as usernames, passwords or credit card numbers, because it ensures that “hackers” can’t intercept that data.

What’s changed?

SSL certificates need to be “signed” by a company that’s trusted by all the popular browser manufacturers. Until recently, only a few of these companies existed, meaning they could charge a premium for their service. Even with bulk discounts, the best price we could offer our customers was $99.

The SSL certificate market has changed a lot in the last couple of years, though. We’ve evaluated several other companies, and we’ve chosen to offer AlphaSSL certificates from GlobalSign at a remarkably lower price: just $19.

(SSL certificates also require a dedicated IP address, which is included at no extra charge in our Gold and Platinum plans. Even if you need to upgrade from our Silver plan, the new price still saves you a lot of money.)

We’ve tested the AlphaSSL certificates extensively (on our own secure Webmail pages) to make sure they work just as well as the old certificates and offer the same level of security. They do.

AlphaSSL certificates have a couple of other advantages, too:

• They can work with both the www and non-www versions of your site (such as “www.example.com” and “example.com”) at no extra charge.
• They include a clickable “security seal” you can place on your Web site for visitors to click to validate your Web site’s certificate. Our previous provider charged an extra $30 for that.

Ready to sign up?

See our support page for full details on using SSL certificates, including other available options like self-signed certificates.

You can easily order a certificate through our “My Account” control panel, and it will usually be installed within one business day.

Our Web hosting plan includes e-mail accounts, free domain name registration, and free WHOIS privacy (an option that often costs $8.99 or more elsewhere). Get the full details here.

This offer is available through January 15 at 5 PM Pacific time, and it’s for new accounts or transfers only — so sign up now if you’re in the market for Web hosting service.

This plan is still eligible for our Referral Rewards program (you’ll get 33% of the $20.10). So if you have friends who need hosting service, be sure to let them know about this special offer.

However, PHP 5 is now more than five years old, and the PHP developers declared version 4 obsolete in 2007. All our new customers have been using PHP 5 by default for more than a year, and we’ve received no complaints about incompatibilities.

No PHP script should require the obsolete PHP version 4 any more. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing it from our servers.

This is unlikely to cause any problems for customers, but we’ll do it in several steps during the rest of 2009 to ensure a smooth transition:

• Now: We no longer mention PHP 4 support on our Web site. Existing customers using PHP 4 are encouraged to switch to PHP 5.
• July 31: New customers who sign up after this date will never see the PHP 4 option in their control panel.
• August 1-31: We’ll identify existing customers who are still using PHP 4 and send e-mail notices asking them to upgrade.
• September 1: Existing customers using PHP 5 will no longer be able to downgrade to PHP 4 without manual assistance from our staff. Also, running “/usr/bin/php” from the command line (for example, from an ssh login or a cron job) will run /usr/bin/php5 instead of /usr/bin/php4.
• September 1-14: We’ll send PHP 4 customers final notices asking them to upgrade.
• September 15 – October 31: PHP 4 customers will be automatically upgraded to use PHP 5 and notified of the change (we’ll upgrade a small number of sites each day). Any customers who experience problems can notify us and downgrade to the old version for 30 days while they work to upgrade their scripts.
• December 1: PHP 4 software will be completely removed from our servers.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.