This post was updated November 30, 2012 to reflect the additional availability of PHP 5.2.17.
We currently offer PHP versions 5.2.6, 5.2.17, and the 5.3 series. You can choose which version your account uses in the “PHP Settings” section of our “My Account” control panel.
PHP 5.2 has been obsolete for many years. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing PHP 5.2.6 from our servers and encouraging customers to switch to PHP 5.3. (PHP 5.2.17 is still available for now, but discouraged.)
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Shortly after we made PHP 5.3.15 available to hosting customers, the PHP team announced the release of version 5.3.16 that fixes several bugs.
We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.15 to PHP 5.3.16 on our servers as a result.
PHP 5.3.15 is now available on all hosting accounts. It’s the default for new customers, and existing customers can update their PHP version using the “PHP Settings” link in our “My Account” control panel.
If you’re an existing customer using an older version of PHP, we haven’t yet changed your PHP version. However, we will begin doing that in about 30 days (we’ll announce that separately), so we recommend that you upgrade now. That way, if you find you’re using an outdated PHP script that isn’t compatible, you can set PHP back to the previous version and work to update the script. The old PHP 5.2 series will be removed from our servers by the end of 2012.
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We’re occasionally contacted by customers who report that mail isn’t arriving (when we can see that it is), or that their Web site is down (when we can see that it isn’t)…. and the mystery is eventually solved by the customer saying “Oh! Never mind. I own something.org [or something.net, or something.biz, etc.], but the person who had the problem was typing something.com”. Sometimes people even make this mistake with their own domain name.
As far as most people are concerned, “.com” means “the Internet” (and vice-versa). You can tell people “something.biz” till you’re blue in the face, but they’ll still often remember it as “something.com”. That’s a real problem if you own one but not the other.
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Within the next few weeks, we’ll be making PHP version 5.3.15 available to customers in our account management control panel (and making the 5.3 series the default for all customers several months after that).
We’ve been testing PHP 5.3 ourselves for some time (among other things, it’s been running our Webmail system for several weeks, handling millions of page views without any problems), but it makes sense to test it on a wider variety of sites before deploying it for everyone.
If you would like to help us test PHP 5.3, just contact us and let us know what site(s) you’d like to enable it for. We’ll do that for you (it needs to be done manually by our staff for now).
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Update 1:41 PM Pacific time: A contact at Level 3 Communications confirms that their San Francisco Bay Area network was disrupted by a “configuration error”, causing problems for a great deal of Internet traffic that passes through Level 3 (not related to us in particular). Level 3 has corrected the problem, so we’re marking this issue as “closed”.
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The “web11” server became very slow and needed to be restarted at approximately 2:00 a.m. Pacific time this morning (June 25). This caused a brief outage for Web sites on that server. Other servers were not affected.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday June 23 2012, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded to version 5.1.63 and restarted. This will cause an approximately 30 second interruption of service on each customer Web site at some point during this hour.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 11:12 PM June 23: The maintenance was completed as planned.
Between 5:10 and 5:22 A.M. Pacific time this morning (June 15), one of our upstream network providers experienced a large distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeted at one of their other customers, overwhelming their core network routers. This resulted in many people being unable to connect to our network during this period.
The problem has been resolved (the provider has blocked the attack), and they tell us it should not recur. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused.
WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday, with some nice new features. Our WordPress one-click installer automatically installs the latest version for new sites. If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you should upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
