I know it has been a little while since our last post so I wanted to go ahead and post a quick update about a few things that have been happening behind the scenes here.
MySQL 5.5
For many of our clients, MySQL is a vital part of their website whether they realize it or not. Most scripts that our clients utilize depend on MySQL in order to function whether it be WordPress, Joomla, Magento, or any number of other scripts. Because of this, any changes concerning MySQL must be planned and tested thoroughly before hand to help make sure that as little service interruption occurs as possible.
We had long been running MySQL 5.1 without issue and although MySQL 5.5 had been out for some time, we opted to hold off on upgrading as a precaution. Without any dire reasons for needing to upgrade, such as patching bugs or vulnerabilities, we opted to take our time testing the deployment and planning it as best we could. We have been slowly performing these upgrades over the past month or so and on Saturday morning we completed the final upgrade of the last remaining server from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5.
Throughout all of the upgrades we received a total of 2 tickets concerning issues that arose as a result. Total combined downtime of PHP/MySQL from all servers as a result of these upgrades was less than 7 minutes. Overall these upgrades were a huge success with virtually no impact to clients at all.
PHP 5.3 & 5.4 Updates
PHP has been on an approximate monthly release cycle for a while now. We upgraded to PHP 5.3.26 and 5.4.16 about three weeks ago. We suspect another release will be made here in the next week or two. We typically get these pushed out within a few days of them having been released, once we’ve had time to test the updates.
Somewhat bigger news was the first official release of PHP 5.5 on the 20th. We hope to begin deploying this on our servers in addition to the existing 5.3 and 5.4 versions soon. This very likely will not happen until a 5.5.1 update is released.
Zend Guard Loader
A version of Zend Guard Loader that is compatible with PHP 5.4 has finally been released and is available on our servers. This now gives you the option of running Zend encoded scripts under both PHP 5.3 and 5.4. Previously ionCube was the only option available for PHP 5.4. At this time, though, we still recommend using the ionCube encoded version of a script if you have a choice. This is simply due to Zend’s history of lagging behind in releasing their loader as new PHP versions are released.
Thanks again everyone for your continued support and business. Without you none of this would be possible! For those located in the U.S. like ourselves, we hope you have a great 4th of July!