As of this week, MySQL 5.6.27 has been installed on all our servers.
When considering server software updates, we always try to balance between providing the newest technologies, ensuring the security of the services we offer, and providing enough time to customers to deal with software related matters, in case their site software is not backward-compatible. The security of our servers is a top priority - in case a critical software vulnerability is found that may affect the security of the whole server, we will be making these software updates immediately.
Due to security fixes in MySQL 5.6.27 and the lack of known backward compatibility problems, our system administrators have installed it on all our servers, forcing its usage by all customers. All previous/older MySQL versions are no longer available.
Following our policy to provide the most recent server technologies which we consider stable enough for production environment, PHP 5.5 is now available on all our servers. Customers can now choose between PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.3 as default PHP interpreter for their accounts.
We are well aware that PHP 5.3 is no longer supported by PHP developers. However, according to our analysis PHP 5.3 still does not pose a security threat to hosting servers. That's why we decided that we will keep it for now, giving our customers enough time to make their software compatible with PHP 5.5 - PHP versions over 5.3 introduce major changes that require some older sites/software to be rewritten.
Security of course is a primary concern, and our system administrators are closely monitoring the situation around PHP 5.3. If a security vulnerability is ever discovered, PHP 5.3 will be removed immediately. That's why we advise customers to make sure that their PHP sites/software are compatible with PHP versions over 5.3.
The First Class Managed VPS plan is now available on servers in Europe.
With two cores of Xeon E5-2630@2.30GHz, 4GB RAM, and 100GB storage on solid-state disks in RAID6 array, the First Class Managed VPS plan provides excellent performance for resource-demanding sites. With the new First Class servers at the Neterra datacenter in Sofia, our customers have more flexibility when selecting a location closest to their visitors.
Our First Class plan has been introduced several years ago with the main purpose to meet the requirements of sites that have outgrown our shared hosting environment but their owners prefer not to switch hosting services.
We are constantly working on improving the specifications of the plan and the VPS servers. In this regard, as of today all new and existing First Class accounts have 6 GB of RAM available (4 GB until now). Respectively, double First Class plans now come with 12 GB of RAM. The prices of the plans remain unchanged.
Also, our team of system administrators recently introduced FastCGI and OPCache for First Class plans. FastCGI and OPCache significantly improve the performance of PHP scripts and are compatible with most popular software packages.
With these updates, we hope that our customers with heavily-visited and resource-demanding websites will have more room to develop their businesses further.
Recently, sources on the Internet reported a critical security vulnerability in the ImageMagick library. ImageMagick is a popular image processing utility for web sites, and it is utilized by many image processing plugins and tools. The vulnerability allows execution of remote code and file manipulation on the server.
Server security is a concern of an utmost importance, and our system administrators are constantly monitoring servers software and security lists, to make sure that our service is as safe as possible.
To mitigate the specific security problem, our system administrators immediately applied ImageMagick policy restrictions on all servers. The additional policy blocks certain ImageMagick features, such as the inclusion of remote data and operations with mvg files. The policy effectively resolves the problem with the specific vulnerability. Although unlikely, it is also possible that the policy would break some features of image processing tools and plugins. Nevertheless, we decided that the benefits of the additional restrictions outweigh the risks, as keeping our customers' data safe is of the highest priority for us.
A secure version of ImageMagick without additional restrictions will be mass-deployed on all servers as soon as it is released by its developers.
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