ICDSOFT

Our in-house hosting Control Panel now has a new section - Git. It allows our customers to easily create and manage Git repositories online, as well as install automatically GitList on their hosting accounts.

Today our Software Team added yet another section to the hosting Control Panel interface. It is for managing SSH access to the hosting account, and controlling the user access permissions to various server-side binaries and tools. Now all our customers, including users on shared-hosting servers, can allow SSH access to their hosting accounts.

This new interface increases the overall account and server security, as customers can allow access only to the features they need and plan to use, while leaving the rest disabled.

Completing a schedule of gradual upgrades, as of today all our servers run PHP 5.6 as default PHP interpreter.

Also, following our policy to provide the latest stable technologies, PHP 7.0 is installed and available on all machines. Customers can switch their domains, or just some folders, to use PHP 7.0 as default interpreter.

PHP 5.3 is still running on our servers to allow customers with older software time to ensure compatibility with newer PHP versions. PHP 5.3 will be available for a limited period of time, as it is in end-of-life status.

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 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.