Our business offices will be closed on Tuesday, January 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
We’ve updated the SSL/TLS security settings on our servers to match current “best practices” for security, disabling the long-obsolete, insecure “SSLv3” in all cases.
Our customers shouldn’t notice any changes. We made this change on our own websites a long time ago with no reports of problems, and nearly all of the largest sites on the Internet have done the same. We’re just mentioning this so that people know to contact us in the unlikely event they do have any trouble.
That said, if you do have any trouble, it’s probably because you’re using a long-outdated, insecure web browser that you should update. You can check your browser by visiting www.howsmyssl.com. If you can’t update it, using a different browser on your computer will probably help.
Our business offices will be closed on Tuesday, December 25 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
The PHP developers recently released a brand new version, PHP 7.3, so PHP 7.3.0 is now available in our control panel (in addition to the PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 series).
We don’t yet recommend PHP 7.3 for most customers. It’s fairly new and some third-party scripts aren’t yet compatible with it. If you want to try it anyway:
After updating, test your site carefully to make sure there aren’t any problems.
By the way, if all this seems confusing, we have a page explaining more about PHP versions and updates.
The somewhat older PHP 7.2 series has been out long enough that all modern script software should be compatible with it, and the authors of popular scripts like WordPress recommend using it. Because of that, we’re making PHP 7.2 the default for new customers.
We haven’t changed the version for any existing accounts, but we recommend that all customers use PHP 7.2 if possible (the instructions above explain how to choose the version your site uses). PHP 7.2 is slightly faster than PHP 7.1 and almost twice as fast as PHP 5. If you care about your site’s speed (and you should), always use the newest version of PHP that’s compatible with your scripts.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.39, 7.0.33, 7.1.25, and 7.2.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 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.
WordPress 5.0 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites. WordPress 5.0 works fine on our servers (make sure you’re using a recent version of PHP for your site).
If you’ve previously installed an older version of WordPress, you should update it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
One thing to note is that WordPress 5.0 comes with a new default editor called Gutenberg. Some people like Gutenberg and some people don’t; if you don’t, you can install the Classic Editor Plugin to continue to use the old editor.
