PHP 7.2.23 and 7.3.10

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.2.23 and 7.3.10 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 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.

PHP 7.1.32, 7.2.22 and 7.3.9

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.32, 7.2.22 and 7.3.9 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.

Free SSL certificates added for all parked domain names

We’ve previously added free wildcard Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates for all our customers who use our web hosting service. Now we’ve added free certificates to all “parked” domain names, too!

If you have a parked domain name on our servers that’s set up to redirect to another site, you can now use https:// URL addresses for the parked domain name and the redirect will work securely, with no problems.

MariaDB / MySQL updated to version 10.1.41; Debian updated to 9.11

We’ve updated the MariaDB / MySQL database software on all our servers to version 10.1.41. This was part of a general update of Debian Linux to version 9.10 and then 9.11.

This upgrade should not be noticeable to our customers in any way, but of course, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or difficulties.

Labor Day 2019 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 2 to observe the US Labor Day legal holiday. 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 Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.

PHP 7.1.31, 7.2.21 and 7.3.8

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.31, 7.2.21 and 7.3.8 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.

Brief server upgrades August 2019 (completed)

Update August 21, 2019: The maintenance described below has been completed for all sites.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be retiring some old servers and moving sites on those servers to new (often faster) ones. Migrating a site takes just a few seconds in most cases, so it’s likely that neither you nor your visitors will notice this happening.

If someone does view your site while it’s being migrated, they’ll see a maintenance screen with a link to this blog post, like this:

If your site is in the small minority that has a large database (more than a few hundred MB), the migration could take a little longer — perhaps a few minutes. We try to do migrations during slow periods for each site, minimizing the impact on visitors.

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PHP 7.2.20 and 7.3.7

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.2.20 and 7.3.7 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 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.

4th of July 2019 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, July 4 to observe the US legal holiday. 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 the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

WP Super Cache 1.6.8 with Cloudflare (and other add-ons that set cookies)

If you have a WordPress site, and you use both the WP Super Cache plugin and the Cloudflare content delivery network, the latest version 1.6.8 of WP Super Cache may not properly cache your pages by default.

This is because of a quirk of the update: A new setting makes it think all Cloudflare visitors are “known users” because they have a “cookie” set. If you had the old “disable caching for known users” option turned on before the update, it won’t cache pages for Cloudflare visitors after the update.

The same thing can happen if you have a WordPress plugin that sets a “cookie” for each visitor for some other reason.

This problem is easily fixed by changing the new WP Super Cache “Cache Restrictions” setting from “Disable caching for visitors who have a cookie set in their browser” to “Disable caching for logged in visitors. (Recommended)”. We’ve updated our WP Super Cache page to reflect this change, and if we notice that a site hosted on our servers suddenly has higher CPU resource usage because of this, we’ll update the setting for you to make it work as it did before.