January 30, 2024 at 12:57 PM

Coming in the month of February, we will be migrating all US-based hosting services (Shared Unlimited, Shared Performance, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated) to a new datacenter. It is also important to know of some expected changes coming to all accounts. Migrated services will still be hosted in the Chicago area, though some features may change depending on your account type. More information is included below.

Migration

Shared & Reseller Hosting: All shared hosting accounts will be migrated over to new hardware in a new datacenter location in the Chicago area. As part of this migration, IPs will be renumbered for all existing shared hosting clients. All hosting account services will automatically be proxied from the old servers to the new servers as part of the migration service, so we do not expect any downtime for shared hosting clients as long as third-party DNS and proxy services (where in use) are updated to the new hosted IP addresses as quickly as possible following the account migration. Further details on this process will be sent to shared account holders directly via E-mail by Monday, February, 5th, 2024.

Shared hosting customers will also be moving to an updated operating system (CloudLinux 8) which will feature access to the latest security updates, database & PHP software versions, as well as improved performance overall. We do not expect to reduce feature support with this update; older PHP versions currently supported will still be available on our shared hosting systems, though the .htaccess directives may change. We will take measures to ensure .htaccess directives are automatically updated where necessary so your selected PHP version(s) remain in tact through the upgrade.

VPS Hosting: All VPS hosting accounts will be migrated over to new hardware and software. IPs will be renumbered, and we will be moving from OnApp to SolusVM for VPS management. We want to keep our VPS services stable and with access to the latest OS templates, which we believe we can achieve to a greater degree with SolusVM at this time, and so we will be moving away from OnApp during the migration. Because each VPS will need to be re-imaged during this migration (to be ported over to SolusVM), we will need to handle VPS migrations on a case-by-case basis and we will be in touch with each VPS client by Sunday, February 11th, 2024 to outline the migration process and what to expect.

Expected downtime will also be on a case-by-case basis; cPanel systems should experience no downtime in most cases. New IPs will be assigned to all VPS services, so changes will need to be made in nearly all cases, so please be sure to keep an eye on your emails and make sure our domain is whitelisted at your email provider so you receive the important details about your service migration. Most cPanel VPS customers will also benefit from this migration in the form of an OS upgrade - CentOS 6 and 7 will be replaced by AlmaLinux 8, offering the latest security benefits and software versions for your VPS.

Dedicated Servers: Dedicated servers will be physically moved from their current location to the new datacenter and will not require IP renumbering. However, this does mean there will be downtime for dedicated server clients as we perform the physical relocation of hardware and transition IP routing over to the new facility. We will send further information on the process and what to expect by Sunday, February 11th, 2024. For clients wishing to transition to a new/updated operating system with cPanel in the near term, we will have alternative options available which would also require less (or no) downtime, but would require IP renumbering and other considerations. We will outline these options in the upcoming email concerning the migration specifics for dedicated server clients.

Service Changes

SpamExperts: We will be retiring support for SpamExperts shortly before the migration window for shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated server customers. We have seen great performance from SpamExperts in filtering inbound spam, but the feature usage has been lower than we expected and the software itself is closed to our administration which has caused a number of headaches for us and for customers over the past few years. We will be implementing stronger spam prevention measures on email systems which presently rely on SpamExperts, and we will be looking at robust alternatives again in the near future.

JetBackup: We will be moving to a newer version of JetBackup which we expect to be more stable for our US-based shared hosting clients. EU servers may also be included in the configuration. Additional backup features will become available after the migration, including possible custom backup and location options for individual clients.

DDoS Protection: Although we have not advertised this feature, US-based hosting clients have benefited from 10gbps DDoS protection since our last encounter with DDoS attackers a few years ago. The new facility features 40gbps DDoS protection which is a significant bump up to our defenses against ransom and takedown attacks directed at us and our customers.

Thank You

We want to say thank you to everyone who has stuck with us through several migrations now, and we hope you continue to enjoy our services in the future. We have seen better connectivity speeds and latency tests at the new facility, and we are looking forward to being able to set some issues aside as part of this migration. If you do have any questions for us, we are always available via email at [email protected] so please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.

October 12, 2013 at 9:01 PM

We are happy to announce a number of improvements for Shared & Reseller clients.

We have phased out usage of PHP 5.2 in favor of PHP 5.3. For 99% of customers this should be a transparent change as we have replicated the configuration between the two very closely. If you do run in to any problems, please feel free to let us know and we will help get any issues resolved. For users on the new Helios server, the primary PHP version is 5.4, with 5.3 available via .htaccess setting.

We have finally managed to work out the quirks with PHP Opcode Caching in our shared hosting environment, and we are excited to be rolling out Zend OpCache support to all servers over the next several days. Atlas is already online with the new Zend OpCache module.

We have also improved server security across the board by enabling CageFS for all current hosting systems. This should not have any negative impact on currently running services.

April 11, 2012 at 3:50 PM

We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our backup facilities across all Chicago Shared, Reseller, and VPS systems to the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 software beginning today. This process will disable backup access for a few days, but once the upgrade & backup seed process is completed, you will find the R1Soft Backups link in your cPanel for easy access to backups.

What does this mean for backups in the meantime? Access to R1Soft CDP backups will not be available again until after your server has been seeded in the new R1Soft CDP 3.0 system. This does mean you will not be able to gain access to the older backups, as well.

Are any changes being made to backup policy & retention? Yes. We are changing from an hourly backup schedule to a daily backup schedule with 7 day retention. This will improve service speeds throughout the course of the day, and keep backup hours to a minimum even on our largest systems.

Will I notice anything else? You may notice slight speed degradation while backups are being seeded for the first time. This process should be negligible in its impact on the currently running systems, however, and we do not expect it to cause any problems with site accessibility.