Author: Chris Wik

[Postponed] Upgrade to php-FPM for Managed Web Hosting accounts

Update 2015-02-09 11:55 We have run into some unexpected difficulties with our particular configuration and decided it is best to revert this change until we can do further testing and iron out the issues. We are currently reverting to the suPHP configuration.

Update 2015-02-09 11:33 We’re working on resolving a mod_proxy configuration issue, please bear with us.

Update 2015-02-09 11:03 We’re starting the upgrade process now.

On Monday 9th February we are planning to upgrade our Managed Web Hosting service which currently uses suPHP, to use php-FPM. php-FPM is a persistent PHP process manager, which should bring a big performance boost to all PHP sites on our Managed Web Hosting platform.

The upgrade will enable us to take advantage of opcode caching in PHP 5.6 which should further increase performance.

Persistent process management will also aid server stability and bring more consistent performance.

We plan to start at 11:00 GMT on 2015-02-09. We’ll keep this blog updated with our progress.

We will be on hand during the day on Monday, so please test your sites post-upgrade and if you find any issues please email support@anu.net and we’ll do our best to help resolve them.

[Complete] Planned upgrade of PHP for Managed Web Hosting accounts

Update 11:34 Sorry for the extended outage. We are happy to report the server is now back up and running with Apache 2.4.10 and PHP 5.6.5

Update 11:23 Apache and Lasso are back up and running, PHP sites currently still returning Internal Server Error.

Update 11:17 We are making progress but have run into a few unforeseen issues that have caused unexpected downtime. We expect to be up and running again within a few minutes.

Update 11:08 The upgrade is in progress, please bear with us.

Our Managed Web Hosting accounts currently run PHP 5.3

Version 5.3 has been end of life for quite some time and is no longer being actively maintained. Some new PHP software now requires version 5.4 or higher in order to run. We are therefore planning to upgrade PHP.

We have tentatively scheduled this for Monday the 26th of January at 11:00 GMT

Loading the new version of PHP will require a restart of Apache but otherwise should be very straight forward and only cause a few seconds downtime.

Please take a moment to ensure any software you are running on our Managed Web Hosting or Reseller Hosting accounts, such as Magento, WordPress, Joomla or Drupal is up to date and is compatible with PHP 5.6.

A list of deprecated features and backwards-incompatible changes for each version can be found at:

http://php.net/manual/en/migration54.deprecated.php
http://php.net/manual/en/migration54.incompatible.php

http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.deprecated.php
http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.incompatible.php

http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.deprecated.php
http://php.net/manual/en/migration56.incompatible.php

We will be on hand during the day on Monday, so please test your sites post-upgrade and if you find any issues please email support@anu.net and we’ll do our best to help resolve them.