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).
Read the rest of this entry »
There’s been a lot of talk in the last few days about a nasty PHP security bug that allows “hackers” to compromise some Web sites that use the PHP scripting language.
Our customers are not vulnerable to this problem because of the way PHP is set up on our servers. You don’t need to worry about it.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the update just fixes several security issues in PHP 5.
After upgrading our systems to PHP 5.2.6, we received reports of an incompatibility with Joomla. Some URLs do not work when Joomla is configured to use “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, but to not have “Use Apache mod_rewrite” turned on.
We’ve investigated this, and it’s caused by Joomla assuming that PHP has a bug that makes it work incorrectly, when in fact it’s supposed to work differently (and is clearly documented to work differently). Older versions of PHP had this bug, but the new version doesn’t.
To help our customers work around this, we’ve “patched” PHP to intentionally reintroduce the old bug for now, thus keeping it “compatible” with Joomla. If you were having trouble with Joomla’s “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, it should be fixed.
We’ll provide more technical details (and a more robust long-term solution) in the near future.
Update: We’ve also reported this problem to the Joomla developers and suggested a solution.
For the last several years, we’ve offered PHP versions 4 and 5 on our servers. This made sense when PHP 5 was new: Even though PHP 5 is faster and more secure than PHP 4, a small handful of scripts were originally incompatible with version 5, and we wanted to give customers a choice.
However, PHP 5 is now more than five years old, and the PHP developers declared version 4 obsolete in 2007. All our new customers have been using PHP 5 by default for more than a year, and we’ve received no complaints about incompatibilities.
No PHP script should require the obsolete PHP version 4 any more. Because of that, we’re beginning the process of removing it from our servers.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve installed a PHP 5 security update. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5.
We’ve installed MySQL and PHP 5 security updates. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5 and MySQL.
The updates were performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that PHP and MySQL were unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero downtime.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you write your own PHP scripts that allow file uploads, we’ve discovered an unusual issue that might affect you. The “permissions” PHP gives to newly uploaded files aren’t always the same — and a recent change to our servers may have altered the permissions your script sees.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve installed several security updates recently. We’ve updated PHP 4, PHP 5, the ClamAV antivirus scanner, and some XFree86 libraries. In addition, we’ve updated our own blog to use WordPress 2.2 — if you use WordPress, make sure you’ve done the same.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve updated PHP 5 on our servers to cover sixteen recently identified security issues. This only affects customers who have chosen to use PHP 5 — but since this upgrade only fixes security bugs, even those customers shouldn’t notice any changes.
Read the rest of this entry »
