Yesterday, we “upgraded” the four older servers to remove PHP 4.X track from your available options. As it’s getting close to the PHP4 End of Life moment (2008-08-08 is D-Day for PHP4) we wanted to go ahead and make the jump now as both versions have been running for almost a full year. We also took the time to upgrade PHP to 5.2.6, as well as compile mysqli as an option. Everything went well and it appears most of you have made the jump to PHP5.X, as there was no mad rush to the ticket desk.

We also wanted to let you know that there are two new staff members covering the tickets, and if you’ve submitted one within the past few weeks you may have met them. Thomas Williams, and Brian Hochstein have joined the team - they both have some familiarity with hosting, and while Thomas is familiar with hosting in general Brian’s pretty familiar with DrakNet as a whole, so give them some time to get up to speed and if you feel you need to have your ticket upped, please don’t hesitate to ask politely. As always, abuse of our staff is just not tolerated here - we’re geeky tech hippies and too laid back to smile while people call us names, so give them some slack while they’re learning about ya’lls quirks.

You’ve got a few weeks left to get yourself on the MySQL 5 server with some leeway time, as in mid-July we’re upgrading all servers to MySQL 5. We’ve had very few requests for this, so we’ll warn you now we’re not going to have an immense amount of sympathy if your stuff is not compatible with the current recommended version of MySQL. We can get you moved over in a few minutes while maintaining your old installation so if you need to take advantage, do so, and soon.

We should get back to our snarky banter posts soon.

Alakazam is now up and running, and houses several folks that moved as well as several new sign ups. Since this are running smoothly there it’s time to address the rest of you antiquated folks.

We’re going to step each thing up slowly so that we can narrow down what upgrade is causing what problem, should you have any problems.

June 16, 2008

On June 16th, we’re going to cease offering PHP4 across all 4 remaining servers and move exclusively to PHP5 only. This is for security reasons, both for the server and because any php scripts that aren’t compatible with PHP yet aren’t really going to be scripts we want on the servers. You have had many, many months with both to prepare for the move over where you had both available to you and we feel it’s now time.

July 7, 2008

We’ll upgrade to MySQL 5 from MySQL 4. Again, we have a box with 5 now - if you have any question or concern that your site will not work with MySQL 5 or that you’ll need to do work on it to make it compatible, you need to speak up now. After July 7th, everyone will have 5 and if you need 4, you won’t be able to find it here.

August 4, 2008

Finally, we’ll be upgrading Apache. The only real issue will be that your password protection will need to be redone after the upgrade. If you have password protected directories, you may want to submit them to us so we can make sure they are re-secured.

Please note that the following programs have no need to be tested and are compatible with standard installations:

• Wordpress 2.5 and up
• Soholaunch recent versions

When you next login to your cPanel, you may notice that you have a bunch, or a bunch more, add on domain slots. We spent today upgrading all accounts on all four servers to include add on slots commensurate with the number of sub domains allotted on each account.

For those that don’t know, an add on domain allows you to host multiple web sites with different domain names on one cPanel account. While they share the main account’s resources across all domain names, to the outside world they appear to be separate. Previously, these were charged at $1.00 per month per slot, and they are still charged $1.00 per month per slot if you need more than you are allotted, but all accounts now come with a number of them already free for your used (whereas before you had to pay for all of them).

If you had an add on domain and were being charged, those packages in your billing have already been closed and if you prepaid, a credit has been issued to your account for the remaining time that you had. If you’d like to order a domain name for your new web site slot, you can do so here if you’d like it added to your account, or you can order it from any registrar and simply make sure the DNS is ns.drak.net and ns2.drak.net.