Brief scheduled maintenance October 27, 2018 (completed)

Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, October 27, 2018, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for each site at some point during this period.

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PHP 5.6.38, 7.0.32, 7.1.22 and 7.2.10

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.38, 7.0.32, 7.1.22, and 7.2.10 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.

PHP 7.1.21 and 7.2.9

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.21 and 7.2.9 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 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.

PHP 5.6.37, 7.0.31, 7.1.20 and 7.2.8

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.37, 7.0.31, 7.1.20, and 7.2.8 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.

PHP versions < 5.6 rebuilt (but please don't use them any more)

Although we haven’t offered the long-obsolete PHP 5.5 (and earlier) series to new customers for some time, some customers who signed up long ago are still using this version (or even earlier versions), despite our nagging you to upgrade 🙂

For those customers still using PHP 5.5 or earlier despite the nagging, this is just a quick note that we’ve “rebuilt” older versions of PHP for technical reasons to allow them to keep running on our systems. They now use slightly newer versions of various libraries, including libxml, FreeType, ImageMagick, MySQL, and OpenSSL, and they no longer support some old obsolete libraries, such as T1Lib. The rebuilt version will be deployed on all our servers within the next few hours.

These changes should not be noticeable. In the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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PHP 5.6.36, 7.0.30, 7.1.17 and 7.2.5

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.36, 7.0.30, 7.1.17, and 7.2.5 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.

Brief MySQL scheduled maintenance April 20, 2018 (completed)

Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, April 20, 2018, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.6.39 to 5.6.40. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer website at some point during this period.

This upgrade is necessary for security reasons and to fix bugs in MySQL. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Update 9:44 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.

PHP 7.2 series now available

We’re now providing support for PHP 7.2 (in addition to the 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1 series), so PHP 7.2.4 is available in our control panel.

We believe it’s stable (it’s used for the blog you’re reading now), but we don’t yet recommend it for most customers. It’s fairly new and some third-party scripts are not yet compatible with it. If you want to try it anyway:

  1. First, update your site’s PHP scripts, including WordPress, Joomla, any plugins or themes you use, and so on
  2. Login to our My Account control panel
  3. Click PHP Settings
  4. Click PHP 7.2 series
  5. 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.

PHP 7.1 is now the default for new accounts

The somewhat older PHP 7.1 series has been out long enough that all modern script software should be compatible with it. Because of that, we’re making PHP 7.1 the default for new customers.

We haven’t changed the version for any existing accounts, but we recommend that all customers use at least PHP 7.1 if possible (the instructions above explain how to choose the version your site uses). PHP 7.1 is slightly faster than PHP 7.0 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.

PHP 5.6.35, 7.0.29 and 7.1.16

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.35, 7.0.29 and 7.1.16 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1 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 MySQL scheduled maintenance March 30, 2018 (completed)

Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, March 30, 2018, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.6.38 to 5.6.39. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer website at some point during this period.

This upgrade is necessary for security reasons and to fix bugs in MySQL. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Update 9:36 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.