The PHP developers recently released a brand new version, PHP 7.4, so PHP 7.4.0 is now available in our control panel (in addition to the PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 series).
We don’t yet recommend PHP 7.4 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:
- First, update your site’s PHP scripts (including WordPress, Joomla, any plugins or themes you use, and so on)
- Login to our My Account control panel
- Click PHP Settings
- Click PHP 7.4 series
- Click Save Settings
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 PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.33, 7.2.25 and 7.3.12 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 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.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 28 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.
As always, we’ll provide 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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
WordPress 5.3 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 5.3 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.
Our IMAP mail servers now support the IMAP LIST Extension for Special-Use Mailboxes. That means we send hints to your IMAP mail program suggesting it should store copies of sent and deleted mail in the “Sent” and “Trash” mail folders on the server, rather than a different location the program might randomly choose.
Without the hints, some mail programs default to storing copies of sent and deleted mail only on your local computer or device. Those copies can’t be seen by other programs or devices, and they aren’t saved in our backups. You could always change that manually, but with the hints, some mail programs — particularly macOS Mail and iOS Mail — will now automatically save the mail to server folders with no extra configuration needed. The copies will then be visible on all the IMAP devices you use, and they’ll be saved in our backups.
What if I don’t want my mail program to use these folders?
In our testing, this change doesn’t affect mail programs that are already storing sent and deleted mail on the server in folders you’ve specified. But if your mail program does change where it stores sent or deleted mail, and you don’t like the change, you can use your program’s settings to explicitly choose where you want sent and deleted mail copies to be stored (for example, this page describes how to set folders on an iPhone or iPad, and this page describes how to change folders for the macOS Mail program).
If your program doesn’t offer that feature, another option is to delete the “Sent” and “Trash” server folders from your mailbox (or ask us to do so). That will prevent any hints from being sent at all, making things work exactly as they did before.
Some of our customers use a script called Adminer (aka adminer.php) that allows them to modify MySQL database entries. It’s similar to phpMyAdmin.
This is fine, except that old versions of Adminer have a serious security vulnerability that allows “hackers” to take control of sites that use it. If you’ve put an old version of the adminer.php script on your site, then you never updated or removed it, your site is vulnerable to hackers. A couple of our customer’s sites have been “hacked” this way in the last week.
To make sure this doesn’t happen to more customers, we’re disabling any old vulnerable versions of adminer.php (versions earlier than 4.7) and replacing them with a link to this page.
If you try to use a copy of Adminer you’ve previously installed, but you get referred to this page, you should simply install a new version from the Adminer website. Be sure to keep it updated in the future (or delete it when you’re finished using it).
