Author: Ashley Lipscombe

Reminder: Google Chrome soon to mark HTTP traffic as insecure

Back in February, we published a blog post informing our customers that Google Chrome, the popular web browser now responsible for almost 60% of web traffic, will be releasing an update (version 68) in July 2018 which marks ALL HTTP traffic as insecure.

This is a reminder that you must have a valid SSL certificate (the green padlock or bar that you see when browsing secure websites) covering your entire website by then or you risk loosing a large proportion of your visitors.

If you have any questions, concerns or wish to purchase an SSL certificate from us which we can install for you please do not hesitate to reach out to us by emailing support@anu.net.

Click here to read the old blog post which goes in to a bit more detail about SSL certificates, HTTP/HTTPS and Google Chrome’s decision.

Vulnerability in PGP mail encryption

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is an encryption mechanism which is often used by businesses to encrypt confidential email communication.

A serious vulnerability has been discovered which allows access to the plain text (unencrypted) messages sent using this encryption protocol.

You can read more at a dedicated website set up to give users information and advice about this vulnerability (click here).

If you are using this encryption method with any Anu products and want more advice, please feel free to contact us by emailing support@anu.net

PHP versions and our 3 anuhosting.net servers

Our original ams1-c5-1.anuhosting.net Direct Admin server runs CentOS 5 which became End of Life at the end of April 2017 and is powered by an older version of PHP (5.5).

In anticipation of this back in 2016 we commissioned two replacement servers. One is powered by CentOS 6 and PHP 5.5 designed to support legacy sites but supports secure protocols such as TLS 1.2 and still receives security updates. The other is a CentOS 7 / PHP 7.0 based server for newer sites who want the best performance and latest security updates. Many of our clients have migrated over and are enjoying the benefits.

We have had enquiries from customers who want to use PHP 5.6 – something that we didn’t support on our Direct Admin servers. PHP 7.2 was also recently released.

We now support a secondary version of PHP on both our ams2-c6-1.anuhosting.net and ams2-c7-2.anuhosting.net Direct Admin servers. By default you will be using PHP 5.5 on ams2-c6-1.anuhosting.net and PHP 7.0 on ams2-c7-2.anuhosting.net. However, if you wish, you can now use 5.6 on ams2-c6-1.anuhosting.net or PHP 7.2 on ams2-7-2.anuhosting.net. In order to change the PHP version per website, there is a setting in the “Domain Setup” section of Direct Admin.

CentOS 5 has been End of Life for almost a year now so we encourage everybody to migrate their website to one of our newer servers. We are always happy to deploy you a second account on our newer servers free of charge for you for a short period of time to allow you to test and migrate your website.

If you have any questions or need help planning a migration to one of our newer Direct Admin servers, do not hesitate to email us on support@anu.net.