The PHP developers recently released versions 7.3.27, 7.4.16 and 8.0.3 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.3, 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
Note that we still don’t recommend using the PHP 8.0 series in production, as it still has numerous compatibility issues with third-party software. PHP 8 is suitable only for testing and experimenting right now. Most customers should use PHP 7.4 instead.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
WordPress 5.7 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 5.7 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.
Recently, Microsoft announced that their “Microsoft Exchange” email server software has several security bugs that allow “hackers” to infect it with malware. That allows the “hackers” to read private email.
Some customers have asked us whether our servers are vulnerable to this problem.
The good news is that we don’t use Microsoft Exchange (or any other Microsoft email server) software, and never have. That means our servers, and our customers who use our email services, are not vulnerable to this problem at all.
We’re upgrading our servers from Debian Linux version 9 (codename “stretch”) to version 10 (codename “buster”). We’ll be finishing that process over the next couple of weeks.
Your website and email should continue working as they always have, and we don’t expect any downtime. However, if you do have any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Although the final steps of the upgrade modify hundreds of software packages on the server, we’ve tested it extensively and don’t expect most customers to notice any change. (We’ve already been using the newer version of Debian for our own servers.)
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