Friday, May 30, 2008

PHP upgrade scheduled for Saturday

The PHP upgrade is being rescheduled for Saturday, May 31st.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

PCI Compliancy and PHP5 upgrade

We have been in the process of becoming PCI Compliant, which is required of all eCommerce merchants. Most of the requirements are standard security measures which were already in place, other requirements are questionable in a shared hosting environment, and still others...are down-right stupid, in my opinion.

Part of what is required is for the server to be running PHP5.25 and Apache 2.x. These are upgrades that we've been planning to do, but some apps that a few customers are running, not to mention many of the pre-installed scripts provided by Fantastico, are not PHP5 ready.

It's much like Microsoft's "pushing/forcing" users to upgrade to Vista, while many applications aren't yet Vista-compatible. In this case, we have no choice in the matter but to upgrade. The plan is to recompile PHP and Apache to run both PHP4 and PHP5 simultaneously, to allow for support of legacy applications. If this doesn't go as planned then we'll go straight PHP5.

It should be a simple process, but if any unforeseen glitches arise or anything you have installed stops working, please submit a support ticket. I'm trying to contact any users who have Fantastico installed scripts that may not be PHP5 compliant. In most cases there's a newer version of the script available that will work with PHP5, it's just not offered by Fantastico. In these cases we will be happy to help you upgrade the application manually, or do it for you.

The upgrade is planned for Friday, May 30th. As always, I'll post an "all clear" when it's done. There should be no actual downtime involved.

Roundcube webmail added

We have a nice surprise for webmail users: Roundcube was installed this week, giving you another choice in webmail applications. Roundcube has a very new, fresh, Mac-like look to it, and all the feedback on it has been positive.

Roundcube webmail

We still offer Horde and SquirrelMail, and you're always free to use any of the (now three) webmail applications to access your email. If you find one application you like best, you can set it to be your default by using the Enable AutoLoad option, so you can go directly to that application when logging in.