PHP 5.4.22 and 5.5.6

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.22 and 5.5.6 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.

In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.

WordPress 3.7.1

WordPress 3.7.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed a version of WordPress earlier than 3.7, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

The 3.7 series of WordPress introduces a feature that automatically applies security updates and bug fixes without you needing to take any action at all — as the WordPress authors put it, you get “updates while you sleep”. It’s a great new feature.

Technical details of the CVE-2013-4365 mod_fcgid bug

This post is technical, and intended for programmers and security experts — it doesn’t affect our customers.

A few weeks back, one of our hosting customers had a PHP script that would constantly crash an Apache Web server process. We spent a while tracking down the cause, and eventually found a bug in the excellent Apache mod_fcgid FastCGI software that was causing it.

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Avoid forwarding spam to other services

When you create an e-mail address in our control panel, you can usually choose the level of spam filtering we apply to incoming mail. One of those options is to turn off the filtering completely.

If you’re just delivering mail to a mailbox on our servers, this may cause your mailbox to fill up with junk, but beyond that, it doesn’t usually cause any problems for us.

But if you’re forwarding all your mail to another service, this can cause problems, and you may find that we apply some filtering anyway.

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Gmail problems September 23, 2013 (resolved)

We’ve received reports from some of our customers about errors or delays sending mail to or from Gmail on September 23, 2013.

This was caused by a general problem at Gmail that they’ve since resolved, and wasn’t related to our servers.

PHP 5.4.20 and 5.5.4

The PHP developers recently released version 5.4.20 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.4 on our servers as a result.

We’ve also introduced support for the new PHP 5.5 series, making PHP 5.5.4 available as a new option in our My Account control panel.

Finally, we’ve updated all versions of PHP to use the latest versions of the ionCube Loader (4.4.3), ImageMagick (3.1.0) and SourceGuardian (9.5) PHP extensions. These changes should be transparent to customers.

In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.

WordPress 3.6.1

WordPress 3.6.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

The new version of WordPress is described as a security release that prevents “hackers” from modifying your site if you use “a popular plugin“, whose name has not yet been revealed so that everyone has a chance to upgrade first. While we may be able to add additional protection against this vulnerability when the details are revealed, updating now guarantees your site will stay protected.

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Protection against a critical Joomla file upload security bug

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about a critical Joomla security bug that allows “hackers” to upload malicious PHP script files to Joomla sites, then run them. This would allow hackers to use your site to send spam, or to replace any file on your Web site.

Although our customers running Joomla should always upgrade to the latest versions when available, we’ve also put rules in place to protect against this vulnerability.

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WordPress 3.6

WordPress 3.6 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.

If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you can (and should!) upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.

PHP 5.3.27 and 5.4.17

The PHP developers recently announced the release of versions 5.3.27 and 5.4.17 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3 and 5.4 on our servers.

In addition, we’ve updated the obsolete PHP version 5.2.17 on our servers to include the fix for a security bug that the updated 5.3 and 5.4 versions solve. (This bug wouldn’t normally be fixed because the PHP 5.2 series is no longer supported by the PHP developers, but we consider it important enough to manually backport the fix.)

These changes should be transparent to customers. In the unlikely event you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.