We are happy to announce a number of improvements for Shared & Reseller clients.

We have phased out usage of PHP 5.2 in favor of PHP 5.3. For 99% of customers this should be a transparent change as we have replicated the configuration between the two very closely. If you do run in to any problems, please feel free to let us know and we will help get any issues resolved. For users on the new Helios server, the primary PHP version is 5.4, with 5.3 available via .htaccess setting.

We have finally managed to work out the quirks with PHP Opcode Caching in our shared hosting environment, and we are excited to be rolling out Zend OpCache support to all servers over the next several days. Atlas is already online with the new Zend OpCache module.

We have also improved server security across the board by enabling CageFS for all current hosting systems. This should not have any negative impact on currently running services.

We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our backup facilities across all Chicago Shared, Reseller, and VPS systems to the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 software beginning today. This process will disable backup access for a few days, but once the upgrade & backup seed process is completed, you will find the R1Soft Backups link in your cPanel for easy access to backups.

What does this mean for backups in the meantime? Access to R1Soft CDP backups will not be available again until after your server has been seeded in the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 system. This does mean you will not be able to gain access to the older backups, as well.

Are any changes being made to backup policy & retention? Yes. We are changing from an hourly backup schedule to a daily backup schedule with 7 day retention. This will improve service speeds throughout the course of the day, and keep backup hours to a minimum even on our largest systems.

Will I notice anything else? You may notice slight speed degradation while backups are being seeded for the first time. This process should be negligible in its impact on the currently running systems, however, and we do not expect it to cause any problems with site accessibility.