The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.31, 7.0.21, and 7.1.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
One of the features of our e-mail system is that we add SpamAssassin headers to most incoming mail, as described on our SpamAssassin page.
Until now, we didn’t add SpamAssassin headers to messages that were “whitelisted” because they appear to be from someone you’ve sent a message to.
In recent years there’s been an increase in forged spam claiming to be from addresses you know, though, often because the other person’s address book has been stolen by a virus. Because of that, it can be useful to see SpamAssassin results even for these whitelisted messages, and we’ve changed our mail system to add SpamAssassin headers to them as well.
This doesn’t change the fact that we won’t reject these whitelisted messages, regardless of their SpamAssassin score. The only change is that we now add SpamAssassin headers, allowing customers who want to examine the SpamAssassin score to do so. Customers won’t notice any change unless they have their own systems to examine the SpamAssassin headers.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.20 and 7.1.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
We’ve also added a custom “patch” to our copies of PHP 7.0 and 7.1 that provides a new feature: logging of slow outgoing connections from your scripts.
This can show the cause when a WordPress or Joomla site suddenly becomes slow or unresponsive for no obvious reason. The culprit is often an add-on plugin or component that contacts a third-party server to do its work, but “hangs” when the third-party server doesn’t respond.
Our page about logging slow external connections has more information.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.19 and 7.1.5 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.18 and 7.1.4 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.17 and 7.1.3 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
We’ve received a couple of reports that audio and video file uploads don’t work anymore in old WordPress versions (4.3.9 and lower). You instead see the message “HTTP error”. (This doesn’t affect uploads of images, PDF files, etc.; it affects things like MP3 files and movies.)
This is because of a bug in the WordPress software itself, which will presumably soon be fixed, and not related to our servers.
However, if this is happening to you, you’re using a very outdated version of WordPress. You should update to the current version 4.7.3, which is easy to do by clicking “Updates” in your WordPress dashboard. We recommend that you always update WordPress whenever it tells you to do so, because it avoids all sorts of problems.
We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server software to fix the security bug CVE-2016-8743.
Customers should not notice any changes, with one exception: If you’ve written your own software, and that software contains certain bugs that haven’t previously been noticed, the update may cause the bugs to be more visible.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.16 and 7.1.2 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 7.1 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.15 and 5.6.30 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0 and 5.6 series on our servers as a result.
In addition, we’re now providing support for the PHP 7.1 series, so PHP 7.1.1 is also available in our control panel.
Finally, the PHP 7.0 series has been out long enough that all modern script software should be compatible with it, and the authors of the WordPress software recommend it specifically. Because of that, we’re making PHP 7.0 the default for new customers, and we recommend that all customers switch to PHP 7. It’s almost twice as fast as old versions of PHP.
If you’re not yet using PHP 7 but you’d like your WordPress or other PHP-based site to seem snappier, or be able to handle twice as many visitors per second, you can easily do so:
Then test your site to make sure it works properly. If it does: Great, you’ve just made your site much faster! If it doesn’t, it’s probably because you’re using older scripts that haven’t yet been updated, and you can simply set PHP back to an earlier version for now. (But be sure to contact the authors of your scripts and ask when they will be compatible with PHP 7.)
As always, if you have any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
