Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.
The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
dotServing is taking steps to have all servers PHP versions updated to PHP5 as the above quote states that PHP4 will cease to be updated as of 2008.
We will be completing the upgrade one server at a time and will no longer be offering PHP4 anymore. More information will be released as we plan the upgrade.
Continuing with
our finding a hosting company articles, this one touches on whois information.
Before picking a hosting company you must do a whois on the host you are looking at. Look at important details such as address, phone number and email.
If the company you are looking at does not list these important details then move on.
It is very important that your host list their contact information in case of emergencies. If your host is using a fake address or phone number then that is a sign you should immediately avoid them.
A true hosting company would have an address, as well as a working phone number (you should test it before signing up) as well as accurate address information.
If a host is lying or hiding whois information, then your host is hiding something and it'd be worth while to ask what.
A server is much like an apartment building. There are limits on space, and the amount of people can you fit through the doors. If a landlord offered you a apartment with unlimited space and unlimited door space, would you think the landlord is crazy? Probably so, as everyone knows an unlimited size apartment doesn't exist, same in web hosting. There is no such thing as unlimited hard drives, therefore unlimited space does not exist. So next time you see such an add, don't buy into the lie.
It is becoming harder and harder for good people to find a web hosting company. There are more choices out there now then ever before, there are also more gimmicks.
With Summer, comes the end of School for all ages of people. The start of Summer represents a mass increase in options on where to host a website, as every Summer the amount of web hosts go up however the amount of web hosting companies remains the same. The difference? Just because someone decides to put up a web hosting web page, does not make them a company.
So what make a real legitimate company? A legally registered company with the local government.
A couple ways you can identify a legit company:
1) If you ask the company you are signing up with is there any applicable tax. For instance, if the company was in Canada, and I signed up I would have to pay the 6% GST tax. If the company is not charging me tax, this would imply that they are either a small company (that makes less then $30,000 a year) or they are not a legal company.
2) Check provincial or state websites to see if they are registered. On
Prince Edward Island, the
government allows you to search the
Island's Business Names Registry (type in dotServing as the name and you will see our company come up), the reason it shows the registered date of Jan 15 is because in order to change your company name on PEI, you must register as a new company, there is no modify option.
It is almost 4am here on Prince Edward Island and the backup server (located on PEI) is doing its normal backup routine.
Every night each server creates an onsite backup of our hosting accounts and then once a week it will move that daily backup to the backup server meaning you will have two backups.
The backup server is a Intel PIII 733 MHZ however it does its job storing all our clients data as well as client who have backup agreements with us, whether they be businesses who want a remote offsite backup solution, or just extra storage for their server.
We encourage all users to ensure they have complete backups of their entire computer system. You never know when something could go wrong and then poof all that data is gone!
Over the weekend we upgraded one of our servers from a Pentium 2.4GHZ to a Pentium 4 650. The upgrade went very well as planned.
Once we moved the files from the old server to the new one we simply had the IP addresses re-routed to the new server, and thats where we are now. The rest is just changing the dns on our name servers, which has already been done, and then no one will be using any of the old servers IP Addresses anymore.
So open your front door and let the new times role, and open your back door to let the old times go out, and I hope everyone effected likes the new server!
