Category Archives: MySQL

Upcoming Changes: PHP 5.4, 5.5 Removal & MariaDB 10.6

Over the next few months, we will once again be revamping all of our hosting servers. We’re excited to deploy hardware upgrades across the board, including additional processing cores and RAM as well as NVMe SSD storage arrays. One of our goals has always been to provide the best performance possible and these upgrades will enable us to continue doing so.

We’ll also be making the switch from CloudLinux 7, which will reach end of life soon, to CloudLinux 9. This will make for some meaningful upgrades to a lot of core system software and libraries such as OpenSSL. We’ve been eagerly awaiting cPanel’s official support of CloudLinux 9 to move forward and have already deployed it and AlmaLinux 9 across all of our internal systems with great success. While the operating system upgrade doesn’t have a significant impact to hosted accounts, there are a couple of related changes that you should be aware of.

 

PHP 5.4 & 5.5 Removal

CloudLinux 9 no longer supports PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 so these will no longer be available for you to use. All accounts still using these very old versions will be switched to PHP 5.6 before servers are upgraded. We encourage you to use PHP 8.1 or newer wherever possible. As always, you can continue to select your desired PHP version via the “Select PHP Version” section of cPanel.

MariaDB 10.6

Replacing servers also provides us with a great opportunity to upgrade the database server software; so MariaDB will be upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6. For most users, this will not be a noticeable change unless you’re planning to use new functionality that the upgrade will provide. Please make sure that your scripts are kept updated as usual and you won’t run into any issues.

 

All clients can expect to receive a notification with further details as soon as their server’s upgrade is scheduled. If you have any questions meanwhile, please submit a ticket and we’ll be happy to answer them.

Server Upgrades Coming Soon!

As many of you know, we like to freshen up our servers from time to time. While some hosts will leave older hosting accounts on legacy hardware until it is nearly failing, we prefer to keep all clients on the latest iteration of our server hardware. This provides consistency across our fleet of servers and gives our clients the best possible experience. Dealing with old, failing hardware is just as a problematic for us as it is for our clients so we do our best to avoid these situations.

The new servers will have faster hardware across the board from the CPUs to RAM and SSDs. Some software updates will occur as well, starting with the OS as CloudLinux 7 will now be the default for all of our hosting servers. Currently, some of our systems are running CloudLinux 6 with their hybrid kernel. We will also be deploying MariaDB 10.3 on all servers (versus 10.1 currently). I know a few of you have been eagerly awaiting the Recursive CTE and Window Function support. Lastly, we’ll also be adding support for CloudLinux’s Node.js selector once all of the upgrades and migrations have settled down.

We expect to begin these server migrations towards the middle of June, with the first batch of notifications going out here very soon. All migrations will be completed by the end of July. You can expect to receive a ticket notification approximately two weeks before your server’s scheduled migration. There will be no downtime during this process and no changes should be necessary on your end as long as you’re using our DNS. If you have any questions meanwhile, please feel free to submit a ticket and we’ll gladly assist in any way that we can.

MySQL 5.5, PHP Updates & Zend Guard Loader

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. Continue reading →