Author: Ashley Lipscombe

UK1 Datacenter

We hope that everybody had a great holiday period given the circumstances and wish you all a happy new year.

Here at Anu we spent a significant chunk of the past few weeks working on our latest growth project, the UK1 Datacenter in Surrey, England.

We own and maintain our own hardware in high security, superior specification facilities so it has been a lot of work planning and executing but we are proud to say that it is now fully operational and ready for use.

If you are an existing customer and would like to migrate to UK1, we would be happy to facilitate this at your request. You can reach our support team by emailing support@anu.net.

If you are interested in high quality managed Linux virtual servers in the UK or in any of our other locations (NL, US, AU, IE) from a single server to a large scale high availability redundant cluster, do not hesitate to speak to our sales team by emailing sales@anu.net.

CentOS 6 End of Life

As of 30th November, 2020, the CentOS 6 operating system is End of Life. This means it will receive no further updates, including security patches.

If your virtual server or hosting account still runs on CentOS 6 or older, we would strongly recommend developing and implementing a mitigation plan as soon as possible. This can be by migrating to a newer operating system or putting appropriate security measures in place.

We have developed a load balancer as a service offering which can be used to protect CentOS 6 environments that need to be maintained for example if the software stack is not compatible with more modern operating systems. This uses a CentOS 7 / 8 load balancer to accept traffic, provides built in SSL / HTTPS and uses the LAN network to access specific applications and services which massively reduces the potential attack surface. We will continue to develop this by adding further performance and security features.

We can also provide bespoke load balancer solutions using CentOS 7 / 8 virtual servers along with web/application servers, database servers and more which can provide a variety of features and security measures such as high availability, IP failover, caching, brute force / vulnerability detection, redirection and more.

If you need any assistance with your CentOS 6 deployments, you can reach out to us by emailing support@anu.net.

PHP 8

Here at Anu, we love to tinker with the latest and greatest. We are keen to provide our clients with access to new software when it is released as per their requirements.

PHP 8 was released November 26th, 2020. It is a major release with a long list of features, improvements and changes. You can read more here.

We have rolled out PHP 8 to all of our CentOS 8 Direct Admin shared hosting servers. You can deploy new accounts with PHP 8 and / or upgrade existing accounts.

We are able to provide virtual servers running PHP 8. We can upgrade existing CentOS 7 / 8 deployments or can provide new virtual servers with a variety of software stack options.

WordPress 5.6 was released to provide initial PHP 8 compatibility (there may be a few further tweaks required). Other major software vendors have also been releasing updates and patches to provide PHP 8 support. It may take a little while for plugin / module developers to catch up and also release updates.

If you would like to take advantage of PHP 8 and it’s associated performance and security gains, do not hesitate to drop us an email at support@anu.net.