It has been a little while since our last “Behind the Scenes” post so here’s another quick update of what’s been happening here at Dathorn. First, we are very happy to announce that we’ve completed the upgrade and migration of all of our hosting servers. Every single client is now on a server utilizing our latest hardware and software packages. This includes items like MariaDB, PHP Selector and, of course, pure SSD RAID 10 storage. The only mechanical drives that we’re using now are solely for backup storage and eventually these will be phased out as SSD capacity continues to grow.

Since all of our servers are now utilizing CloudLinux’s PHP Selector, we no longer have to perform scripted rebuilds of PHP and related dependencies as they are updated. As such, we will no longer be announcing these minor updates on our forums since they really don’t have any impact for our clients to be concerned about. You can always keep an eye on “Alt-PHP” updates on the CloudLinux blog if these items interest you.

Earlier this month we completed the deployment of cPanel version 58 across all of our servers. Most visible among the updates would be the changes made to Paper Lantern which you may have already noticed. There were, however, a number of system changes that aren’t so visible. One that you should be aware of is that the “Trash” folder on email accounts is now included in the email account’s disk usage. Believe it or not, this wasn’t the case before and it just didn’t make much sense. This often created confusion because email accounts would be reported as using far less disk space than they actually were. While this doesn’t change the cPanel account’s disk usage at all, it does allow email disk usage to be more accurately reported and managed, which is long overdue.

Going forward through October, we do still have some internal services that we need to migrate to new servers, such as our primary name server (ns1) and some backup servers. This is necessary as we approach the end of life for RHEL 5 / CentOS 5. We’ll be taking this opportunity to replace some older Adaptec RAID controllers with newer LSI ones as well. This maintenance won’t have any impact on clients but I did want to provide some insight on what we have planned here. That’s all for now, we hope you’re enjoying the cooler Fall weather as we are!