A few months ago, we told you that we were going to remove old versions of PHP on the (gs) Grid-Service and streamline the process to add new versions and security patches as they become available. As of March 31, we will be removing old versions of PHP4 and PHP5, replacing them with the newer, more stable and secure PHP5.3.10.

What does this mean for you?

New and automatic PHP updates help keep your sites secure and up-to-date. For the vast majority of websites, this change will be completely transparent. However, it’s a good idea to log into your AccountCenter and confirm that you are set up to use the latest version of PHP. We have a handy KnowledgeBase article on how to do that here.

If you are using PHP4, your website will probably work under PHP5, but it’s a good idea to change versions and confirm that everything on your site works correctly. Again, for most customers, this will not present a problem. If your application doesn’t work, you should check with the creators to see if they have an upgraded version that will work with PHP5. For help checking, feel free to contact our support team.

Why is PHP4 going away?

PHP4 has been unsupported since 2007. Its last security update was in 2008 and the developers of PHP recommend against using it. For security and stability reasons, it is time to remove it from our systems.

If you have any questions about this or any other aspect of your (mt) Media Temple services, please feel free to contact us.

We have some good news for (gs) Grid-Service users: We are about to launch our new mail product! As mentioned in our last product update, our new mail product is professional-class mail that is also beautiful and easy to use. Also, (mt) Mail comes at no additional cost for Grid customers!

Here are the feature highlights:

• Beautiful Webmail: Access email, contacts and calendar from a great-looking, but sophisticated mail client.
• Getting Ready for Business: The new email service is designed with an intense infrastructure to deliver fast, supported, business-class email.
• Calendar: With a simple drag-and-drop interface and with CalDAV, you will never miss an appointment again.
• Address Book: Modern contact management that comes in a beautiful interface and supports CardDAV.
• Quality IMAP Support: Proven software stack, reliable IMAP connections that you’ll love.

Here are the launch details:

Starting next week and continuing over the next few months, we’ll be enabling (mt) Mail in a staggered fashion. This means that some users will have access to Mail next week, while others won’t see it for a few months. While the new mail product will launch in phases, all Grid users will see a new webmail login page starting today. This new, cleaner webmail login page is just the start of our changes. We’re slowly enabling Mail so that we can monitor and track the experience.

Once you are able to access the new (mt) Mail, we’ll migrate all of your existing mail, address book contacts and other various settings over to the new product. If you choose not to use our new Mail product, for a limited time, you will be able to continue to use any of the legacy webmail clients that we support today. Please note that that within the next 6 months, we plan to eliminate these old clients and, eventually, we will be migrating everyone over to the new Mail. We encourage you to take the leap now.

We appreciate your patience with our phased rollout. We know that you’re excited to have access to this new product and we can’t wait to get it into your hands.

We have some good news for PHP users on the (gs) Grid-Service. Available for immediate use, (mt) Media Temple has released a new, simple method for dealing with PHP versions and updates. Please read on for more information.

Outdated software leaves you open to hackers, and updating old versions by hand is a pain. To keep you safe and to make site management simpler, we are now providing new version controls with automatic updates.

Updated Controls

The latest PHP versions are now available in the AccountCenter. For each domain hosted with Media Temple, you can choose which version to use.

We recommend choosing the most recent version, as it will be the most secure and ensure compatibility with the latest web apps. For instance, the latest version of WordPress requires PHP 5.2.4 or newer. If you’re using WordPress, be sure to upgrade! It’s pretty easy.

For those of you specifying PHP versions manually, you can learn more about the AddHandlers in our KnowledgeBase article.

Automatic Updates
As new PHP versions are available and others become unsupported, we will be removing old releases and automatically moving you to stable and secure versions. While most websites will be unaffected by these upgrades, we will make sure you receive plenty of notice so only good surprises come your way.

If you have any questions, feel free to add a comment here or join us in the User Forums.

Thanks for reading!

Hello, my name is Sara and I lead the Product Team at (mt). We are a team focused on many things — from creating the beautiful design and intuitive user experience of our products; to managing the development of projects; to writing clear, concise content; to making sure our existing products are working to meet your needs; to developing and delivering new features and enhancements out to the site; and, a little bit of everything else in between. Basically, our entire job is about customer experience. We are passionate about features, designs, grammar, code, deadlines, and we like to have a bit of fun along the way.

I’ve been with (mt) for just over a year but it feels like I started just a week ago. Nonetheless, today I am excited to finally introduce myself along with the rest of the Product Team to you.

Without further ado… Here’s the (mt) Product Team!

Back row, from left to right: Robert V., QA Engineer; David B., Sr. Software Engineer; Chad S., Project Manager; Mike M., UX Engineer; Matt J., Product Manager, @ehmatt; Paul S., Product Designer, @scrivs; Jon S., Creative Director, @jonsetzen.
Front row, from left to right: Julian N., Software Engineer; Shiloh G., Project Manager, @shi_at_mt; Elite B., Technical Writer, @mt1337; Sara H., VP Product, @saralouhicks; Ian M., UX Engineer; Dain K., UX Lead, @dainbrain. Not pictured: Matt B., Software Engineer, @mdylanbell.

Let me start off by acknowledging that this update is overdue! This post is my first communication of many where I intend to share updates on some of the awesome things we are releasing. While we’ve been working incredibly hard, we feel we can do better in communicating more often and with better clarity. Hence, one step forward in this goal, I have recently published our Product Roadmap. This new resource will help you to stay updated on what we’re working on and what we’re releasing.

Next, I’d like to review the progress we’re making. In 2011, we’ve had a sharp focus in a few key areas:

• Reliable performance across all of our technologies.
• Re-designed architectures to replace aging systems developed in our early start-up years.
• Release often, be happy. Just as important as new code, (mt) needs best-in-class practices to assist our team’s ability to happily build, maintain, and continuously improve our services.

While these key areas may not represent the shiniest bullet points you can imagine, we believe this focus is a necessary priority for (mt) Media Temple to prepare us for what we’d like to do next. Especially with technologies like our (gs) Grid-Service, our mission to solidly deliver on our customer promise has never been as strong. So far this year, the results have lead to dramatic improvement in overall reliability, reduced latency, time-to-repair, and new feature release times. In summary, 2011 has been all about being more disciplined, focused and relentless in helping people achieve success in business and in their personal lives using our technology.

(gs) Grid-Service Improvements

Improving the overall stability and improving the up-time performance of the Grid has been our number one priority this year. This is an area where we’ve made numerous “under the hood” changes. We think the results have been paying off, but as you can see from the graph below we still need to improve.

This 2011 (YTD) heatmap represents the number of times per day we didn’t meet our goal of having the Grid’s response time delivered in under one second. In the beginning of the year, you can clearly see that we suffered slow periods and even lack of availability. Things improved in the second and early third quarters, but then we had a few incidents in August. The good news is that the past couple months have been our best yet. We’re going in the right direction. We are working on this area constantly and you can expect to see even more improvements before the end of the year.

Improved Web Response Times

Since ‘up’ means we are delivering what you expect, we worked to improve how fast your websites load. Early in 2011, we added SSD (Solid State Drive) technology to all of our storage, delivering your ideas 25% faster. We wrote about SSDs here on our blog and below is a graph that illustrates the performance improvements we’ve seen.

Improved Mail Performance

We’ve been painfully aware that many Grid users have been unsatisfied with email stability and web response time. As a corrective measure, we upgraded all of the base software to Dovecot which resulted in some improvements to the email experience. This was just the start. In a prior post, we announced plans to completely separate our email and web clusters. This large project is going better than expected and will be complete by January.

CloudFlare

We released our partnership with CloudFlare to become the web’s easiest speed and security system hosting solution. We’ve already helped thousands of people accelerate their websites, at no additional cost, which has helped conversions, SEO, security, and more.

(dv) Dedicated-Virtual 4.0

In February, we fully updated our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server product line with a totally new hardware platform and a completely updated software stack to bring users the most powerful and feature-rich VPS we’ve ever offered. If you missed it, you can read up on the details on our blog. And, just this month, we updated the (dv) 4.0 line to Parallels Plesk Panel 10.3 giving you access to the newest Plesk features.

Coming Soon: Finish the Year Strong!

SiteMover

Our SiteMover product is a premium offering to help anyone move their site to or from Media Temple. Initially, we will be focused solely on WordPress sites but our intent is to expand this to all sites. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to move their site. We expect this to launch this week. Stay tuned to our product roadmap and to our blog for details.

Software Stack Updates

In addition to installing SSDs, we overhauled the software behind your websites. We upgraded the root operating system, migrated everyone to MySQL5 databases, and made future upgrades easier by managing your servers with Puppet.

The next step, which is long overdue, is to eliminate old versions of PHP across the whole system. PHP 5.3 is the default for new (gs) services, but you haven’t had access to it from the AccountCenter yet. New controls are in progress to make choosing and updating software easier than ever. We’ll share full details on our blog about what these changes mean for you as the time nears.

(mt) Mail: Premium Mail Service

Soon, after several months of development and testing, we will release a new email service that provides a completely redesigned experience to web and mobile email. Some highlights include:

• Web and Mobile mail: Access email, contacts, and calendar from anywhere with a browser or mobile device.
• Getting Ready for Business: The new email service is designed with intense infrastructure to deliver fast, supported, business-class email – all at a low price.
• Calendar: Modern calendar management supporting mobile sync, social sharing, and CalDAV.
• Address Book: Modern contact management supporting mobile sync, social sharing, and CardDAV.
• Quality IMAP Support: Proven software stack, reliable IMAP connections that you’ll love.

(mt) Mail is a professional-class mail product that will be available for a fee. We’ll have all the details on features, pricing, and all the other bells and whistles when we get closer to launch. The good news is that our new (mt) Mail product will be free for Grid users! The roll out will start later this year. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.

Support Chat

We are adding yet another channel to our customer support systems. As one of the first and most active companies on Twitter and Skype, we’ve decided to add Chat to our available options. We’ll start a limited beta later this year.

We Know You Want to Hear About (cs) Cluster-Server

Last, but certainly not least, we have a much anticipated update regarding our (cs) Cluster-Service project. Many of you recall that, in 2009, we announced that we were working on the successor to the Grid, a new product called the (cs) Cluster-Server.

In our State of the Grid update last year, we commented that we realigned and strengthened our teams and shifted focus to make (cs) happen. I am happy to report that we’ve made significant progress. Before I get to the details, it’s important to note how our thinking about (cs) has evolved since we first started talking about it in 2009.

While many of the ideas around (cs) were solid and many of the core principles live on in our newest designs, we have decided to move on from some of the original concepts and from the (cs) name itself. From 2009 to now a lot has changed in the technology space, so much so that we’ve been able to take advantage of new ideas to develop a new platform and product from the ground up. We’re sure you’re eager to hear more. So, please read on to learn about what’s next.

Introducing a New 1-Click Application Experience and Hosting Platform

For most of this year, we’ve been working on our next generation hosting platform and we’re eager to share the details and deliver the new features. The first step is an entirely new 1-Click Application experience, built on top of an entirely new platform. The (gs) Grid-Service today hosts hundreds of thousands of applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others. Brand new controls and hosting architecture will simplify the app installation process and make maintenance easier than ever.

Your applications will be installed on new innovative architecture and back-end systems that are reliable, fast, and powerful. We think one of the most exciting developments is our new storage back-end. For years, hosting platforms have had to choose between high-performance direct attached disks or a high-availability network attached system. Our system uses synchronization to provide the best of both worlds — blazing fast and rock solid.

The applications that power your website will be accessible via an entirely updated and modern interface. This will be the first step of many as we completely overhaul the AccountCenter over the next year to improve and simplify your experience.

What does this mean? This means that soon you’ll have access to a large gallery of apps and it will be easier than ever to install, manage, secure, and update your applications. We plan to take away the headache that is managing your applications so that you can focus on what’s important, your website.

We know that the real test will be when you experience this new product for yourself. We will be launching in limited beta later this year. As I mentioned before, this is our first step toward releasing our next generation hosting product. It’s a small start and we have many exciting plans for where we intend to take the product next year. We’re sure you have many questions, especially around what this means for the (gs) Grid-Service. We’re working through the numerous details and will have much more to share in the coming months.

Our Newly Published (mt) Product Roadmap

Lastly, we are super excited to share our (mt) Product Roadmap with you. Our Labs page, where we used to post information on what we were working on, was grossly out of date and in need of an overhaul. Our new Roadmap page will be your one-stop shop to find out what’s happening. It will be updated regularly, in near real-time, to include new projects and will include status updates on projects in progress. Our goal is to be ridiculously transparent with regards to what we’re doing. We also want your feedback. If there’s something you feel passionate about and it’s not on our Roadmap, then let us know.

I would love your feedback on anything mentioned above or questions about anything else that’s on your mind. You can leave a comment here on the blog, find me on Twitter @saralouhicks or join us in the User Forums. As I said, going forward you can expect to hear from us much more often!

Thank you for your continued loyalty to (mt) Media Temple.

Sincerely,

Sara

To get started, you just need to log into the (mt) AccountCenter and after a few clicks CloudFlare is up and running on your site. Activating CloudFlare automatically optimizes the delivery of your web pages and protects your site from harmful attackers and crawlers.

How does it work?

CloudFlare powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. People view your site through an accelerated path that uses the shared security knowledge of thousands of other sites to automatically detect and block malicious traffic.

The result: Your pages load faster and are more secure than ever before, at zero cost.

How do I get started?

All you need to do is login to the AccountCenter, enable CloudFlare, and activate one of your eligible sites. For most sites, setup is handled automatically and will take less than five minutes. If you have domains registered elsewhere or use custom settings on a (dv) Dedicated-Virtual or (ve) Server, some steps will need your input.

CloudFlare setup, activation, and service are all free and there is no commitment. Turning CloudFlare on and off takes two clicks after activation, so feel free to try it out.

To learn more visit our CloudFlare product page. Questions and comments are always welcome either here on our blog or in our User Forums. Overall, we have been super impressed and think your experience will be amazing.

At the beginning of the year we mentioned several initiatives we’ve been working on to improve overall (gs) performance. Last month we told you about email performance improvements. Today we’re happy to tell you about ongoing storage improvements we’ve made that have improved overall web response times across the Grid.

For the last couple months we’ve been quietly enhancing the (gs) storage infrastructure with the addition of a caching layer built with extremely high speed Solid State drives. We’re about 80% complete with this work and happy to tell you that Grid Clusters with this new enhancement are reporting 25% speed increase for average web response.

As you can see above, storage segments using SSDs are responding faster. The graph shown here compares web response times from three (gs) storage segments with SSDs to three without. Before installation, trial storage performed roughly the same as other segments. As SSDs were added, response times decreased and settled around 25% faster than the rest.

This is a notable improvement, but just one enhancement in ongoing improvements we’re continuing to implement across the (gs) storage architecture.

What is a Solid State Drive?

Put simply, it’s a storage drive that has no moving parts. No spinning disks mean significantly faster data access times, though they generally can’t hold as much data as traditional disk. The speediness of SSD’s make them a perfect fit for a caching layer, where speed is of the utmost importance.

Why is Caching Important?

Good caching tends to make a big difference in a large, clustered environments like the (gs), because the most ‘popular’ data is what tends to slow down the traditional disks leading to increased response times. With a fast cache layer in place, the popular data comes directly from cache, taking the load off the rest of the storage system which leads to overall speed increases for all users.

Does this apply to my site yet?

Right now all customers on clusters 3, 4, 7 ,8 and 9 are using SSDs and work has started on clusters 1 and 6, with 2 and 5 scheduled immediately after. Upgrades are scheduled for upcoming normal maintenance windows to make the transition as convenient as possible. To find out which cluster your (gs) resides on, log in to the AccountCenter and click on your Server Guide from your grid control panel.

Ongoing Improvements

We’re happy with the results from SSDs and the Dovecot email rollout , but we’re not stopping there. We’ve recently started increasing the physical RAM across all (gs) nodes, and we’ll be reporting on that as it gets closer to completion.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments below and join the discussion in the User Forums.

In our recent State of the Grid post we talked about improvements we were making to the (gs) email system, specifically making it faster and more reliable. Today, we’re happy to announce that the initial improvements have been rolled out to all (gs) clusters, and email performance has been greatly improved. Read on to find out how the significant updates to the (gs) IMAP and POP3 email server is helping to keep email quick and stable on the Grid.

Introducing Dovecot

We’ve been painfully aware that many users have been unsatisfied with email stability and web response time, so we set about finding ways to make improvements. With over 600,000 mailboxes active on the Grid, even small changes had the potential to make big differences, so we looked at our email system from its foundation and evaluated the changes we could make that would bring the greatest improvements.

The first step was to make sure the email server software was as fast and reliable as it could be. We ended up switching from Courier IMAP to Dovecot.

Dovecot describes itself as “an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux systems written with security primarily in mind.” It’s known for being standards compliant, high performing, and for having a small memory footprint. Our initial evaluations showed impressive performance gains, leading us to start a full roll out of the new system. We have now upgraded every cluster to Dovecot, and the load change has been impressive.

Reduced Email Load

This graph shows the average email load for all clusters just before Dovecot was rolled out on Cluster 01 while all other clusters were already updated to Dovecot. The average load for c01 hovers around the 40 “Bad” red line with clear spikes above 40, while all other clusters have much lower and more stable average loads. You’ll notice that on Clusters with Dovecot enabled email load stays below 15… a vast improvement.

System-wide Response Time Improvements

Drastically reduced load on email nodes means more reliable processing, and fewer operations on storage. This improved efficiency doesn’t just affect email… these reductions in email load means the disks can handle larger spikes in web traffic, so overall web performance has also seen improvements.

While the first cluster was upgraded on January 13th, we didn’t want to blog about it until the improvements applied to all (gs) users. We wanted to make it clear that “done” meant “done for everyone” and apologize if you felt left in the dark as the project progressed.

While Dovecot has shown to be effective in improving your email experience we know that there is still progress to be made so we’re actively working on other initiatives, including a new email architecture. Wherever possible we will continue to communicate and show the data from our next improvements.

What’s Next?

The other improvements we mentioned within the State of the Grid are in process as well. New MySQL, extra storage hardware in the form of new Solid State Drives (SSD) being added to all storage segments, and even more future email system improvements. We still have many improvements to make your experience better on the Grid and we promise that we’re not done yet.

Feel free to comment here and in the User Forums and we’ll keep you up to speed on what’s done and what’s coming.

Hi, my name is Matt Jones and I’m on the Product Team here at (mt). I want to close out 2010 by making sure everyone who wants to stay informed about our (gs) Grid-Service has the latest information on the status of the platform. If you’re unfamiliar with the (gs), it is a cluster-based hosting platform that we launched in late 2006. The (gs) is home to over 400,000 domains serving up more than half a billion web hits per day. At launch, the (gs) gave birth to a new way of thinking about on-demand web hosting and was a big departure from traditional shared hosting technology. We set expectations high and in some cases over-delivered but the system itself has not been without its share of problems.

In the past we have communicated a great deal of transparency about the Grid, conveying its success and its shortcomings, but in 2010 we fell short on the frequency of our communications. Users of the Grid deserve to have all the information – whether good, bad, or ugly and I’m committed to delivering the details. Read on to see progress this year with the (gs) and upcoming improvements for 2011.

2010 in Review

Despite the wide adoption of the (gs) platform, as we came into 2010 the stability of web, email, and MySQL were improved, but not up to the (mt) standard. We hear the sentiments on Twitter and blogs, and we surveyed all of our customers this year, and while the vast majority of users remained happy, there were far too many that experienced frustrating downtime, security and service interruption issues. The top three issues our users asked us to focus on were Uptime, Stability and Security. With these as our prime targets, we’ve continued to make improvements to the (gs) platform in 2010. The following is a sample of some of the biggest changes this year:

Security Improvements

2010 brought a drastic increase in malicious attacks on hosting providers – more than we’ve ever seen. While many large web hosts felt similar pain, we found our (gs) platform to be a particularly attractive target due to its size and unique architecture. Many of our customers suffered and, frankly this is just not acceptable to us at (mt). To mitigate and repair the issues, we formed an internal, multi-disciplinary security team who led efforts to drastically improve security on the platform.

These improvements, many of which we’ve talked about before included: Ongoing security scans and greater automated detection of the most common exploits across the entire (gs), enhanced blocking of internet addresses that try to hack the Grid, and several infrastructure and configuration level fixes. We’re happy to mention that though attacks continue, as they do at every hosting company, we’ve seen a 77% drop in affected domains since October. Exploit counts continue to drop and we estimate about 0.7% of (gs) domains are experiencing problems. The best way to keep your websites safe is to follow good practices like keeping your software up-to-date and changing your passwords, but (mt) will be watching your back.

Uptime & Stability

We have always monitored server health, but at this scale traditional ‘best practices’ become unmanageable. We needed to step up and anticipate problems before your sites were affected, so we completely rebuilt our internal monitoring systems to give us the greatest possible visibility into every aspect of the Grid architecture. We’ve built in specific alerts for leading indicators to performance issues – giving us the visibility we need to minimize or prevent downtime from occurring. Today, we’re continuously identifying and fixing issues that you will never notice.

Updated Email Spam Filters

With over half a million mailboxes on the (gs) system, spam email was becoming an issue that not only annoyed our users, but created noticeable performance issues on the (gs). We worked with Cloudmark, the industry’s fastest, most accurate and most scalable spam, phishing and virus protection system, to update all user mailboxes. Filtering is now better than ever, but if you are still experiencing problems please contact support and let us know immediately.

That’s not everything that changed in 2010 but it definitely represents the highs and lows. Now we want to share with you some highlights that are on our roadmap for the Grid for the early half of the year.

2011: Coming Soon

Faster Web and Email

(mt) Engineers have been working hard to optimize responsiveness and reliability for the most important services: Web and Email. By changing our load balancing scheme and email architecture we expect mail to be between 1.5 and 3 times faster. We don’t have numbers on the web response yet, but we will be discussing the geeky details in the user forums.  Incremental roll outs will begin in early January and we will share more specific details once they get started.

In addition, we are working to decrease page load times by adding Solid State Drives (SSD) to all storage segments. The SSDs will let us serve more content from cache on disks that respond many times faster than normal hard drives. This has already decreased load times for the newest clusters and we are evaluating the best way to roll this out to all clusters.

Beyond making these performance improvements we’re also actively investigating ways to separate our email and hosting architectures. To make a long story short, we’re convinced this is the way to go to improve the reliability and performance of the Grid and offer a world-class email solution at the same time. Again, we’ll provide many more details as research and discovery phases conclude.

Easier Software Updates

One of the best ways to stay secure on the internet is to keep your software up-to-date.
The Grid’s custom Linux architecture has made updating software without breaking user sites or creating customer downtime very difficult. Many users have asked for newer versions so they can use the latest and greatest applications, and because they are as concerned as we are about the security benefits of up-to-date software. The next cluster will launch with completely updated OS, PHP, and MySQL and we’re continually working to update software across all clusters.

What About (cs)?

In 2009 we announced that we were working on the successor to the (gs)… A product called the (cs) Cluster-Server.  This was exciting news to users on the (gs), but its now almost 2011, and the (cs) still hasn’t been rolled out. Understandably, our users are wondering what the hold up is.

Put simply, we chose to dedicate our resources to improving the hosting experience for our existing (gs) customers, numbering in the tens of thousands before we were comfortable working on something new. That said, many of the (gs) improvements you’ve felt in 2010 as well as the upcoming enhancements for 2011 were originally slated to be a part of (cs). We felt the benefits to providing improvements for existing users far outweighed the benefits of creating a brand new system, and overall Grid performance and Stability improved in 2010 because of it.

We haven’t yet delivered on our promises with regards to the (cs). We want to make it quite clear that there isn’t anything more important to us than launching (cs) and continuing to make the Grid a more reliable, secure, and feature-rich service. In the past couple months we have realigned and strengthened our teams and shifted focus to make this happen. We’re in much better shape than ever before to make these promises a reality. We know that actions speak louder than words, so stay tuned. We’re excited for what’s in store for 2011.

You’ll Be Hearing From Us…

There are many other projects in progress that we’re excited to talk about, but it’s a bit too soon to share details. Expect product updates on the weblog on launch days and more detailed conversations in the user forums. Support agents, engineers, and managers are in the forums every day. Don’t be shy!

As we head into 2011 I want to re-emphasize that I’m committed now more than ever to improving the Grid product and to launching (cs). In fact, it’s one of my resolutions for the New Year! (Well, that, and finish my first Ironman Triathlon.)

I would love your feedback on anything mentioned above or questions about anything else that’s on your mind. You can leave a comment here on the blog, find me on Twitter @ehmatt, or join me in the (gs) User Forums.

Thank you for your continued loyalty in (mt) Media Temple.

Happy New Year,

Matt Jones

We have some good news today for PHP users on the (gs) Grid-Service. Available for immediate use, (mt) Media Temple has released new and updated PHP versions. Coming soon, customers will have a new, simple method for dealing with PHP versions and updates. To use the new versions now, please see the wiki: http://mdtm.pl/dg7e5i. To learn more about what’s coming, please read on.

New PHP Version Selector:

The enhanced PHP Selector will offer three options for setting the PHP version of your sites on the (gs) Grid-Service:

CURRENT STABLE

By choosing this option, PHP will be set to a version that we determine to be current and stable for the (gs) Grid-Service. It may not always be the latest stable release offered on the PHP website, but rather a recent version that has been tested and proven to work well with the (gs) Grid-Service.

Example: As a customer, you set your PHP version to be CURRENT STABLE. Your sites will use PHP 5.2.14. When we validate that PHP 5.3.2 works well on (gs), we will make that version CURRENT STABLE, and your sites will then automatically be using PHP 5.3.2. You will be notified in the AccountCenter and the version will continue to change throughout the year.

EXPERIMENTAL

By choosing this option, PHP will be set to a very recent and untested version.

Example: As a customer, you set your PHP version to be EXPERIMENTAL. Your sites will use PHP 5.3.2. When we install a new version, your sites will automatically update. The new version may not have been tested with the (gs) Grid-Service.

SPECIFIC VERSION

This option allows you to see all versions of PHP installed in the (gs) Grid-Service and allows you to lock PHP to a specific version.

If you lock to a specific version that becomes old or insecure, the (gs) Grid-Service will notify you and update your PHP version to the next highest number. This process was chosen to minimize any impact to applications resulting from incompatibilities between PHP versions.

Transition:

To get ready for these new changes, (mt) Media Temple recently began provisioning all new sites with Suhosin PHP 5.2.14.

We will announce to customers when the New PHP Selector is available, and we will encourage customers to use the new tool to set the most appropriate option for each site. By default we will set every new site to use the CURRENT STABLE option. Manual version selection through .htaccess files will continue to be available.

As a courtesy to help customers avoid application incompatibilities, we will leave PHP 4.4 installed and allow its use via the SPECIFIC VERSION option. However, we will eventually no longer support PHP 4.4 and it will be removed. At that time, all of your sites will be set to use the CURRENT STABLE option (PHP 5.2.14) – unless you have already chosen a higher version.

The GRID has served thousands of users’ web apps with a choice of PHP4 & 5, but newer, faster, more secure versions of PHP are available. As of Tuesday September 14th, new domains and services on the (gs) Grid-Service will default to PHP 5.2.6.

In addition to updating the default version, (mt) Engineers will increase PHP security on the GRID by including the Suhosin hardening patches with PHP 5.2.14.

For now, you can still choose PHP 4 or 5 for your sites through the AccountCenter. As new versions are released, you will be able to opt-in to the latest and greatest. However, the default will always be a stable build. We encourage you to update as soon as possible to stay secure and keep compatible with the rest of the interwebz. For the same reasons, outdated software will eventually be removed from the GRID.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more opt-in announcements and end-of-service schedules, including PHP 5.2.14, 5.3.2, and the removal of PHP4.

Current PHP 5.2.14 Stable
http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v5