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Dear Customers,

We have a number of improvements and upgrades to our service coming over the next couple of months; the first is installing suPHP and upgrading MySQL to version 5. These improvements will further help secure our web servers and improve performance.

Maintenance Window
This will take place between 24th and 25th May 2008 across all servers.

suPHP
suPHP will add the following benefits to our service:

1. PHP will run as the account user and not as the Apache user as it does currently.
2. Any files created via a script will have the correct account user ownership instead of “nobody”, this means you will no longer need to email support t have files corrected.
3. Protection against insecure file and folder permissions, scripts will fail to work if they have insecure permissions.

You will no longer be able to use the php_value, php_flag or php_admin_value tags in the .htaccess files to override some of the server wide PHP settings. Instead you will now need to use a php.ini file located within your account to override the settings.

We will be correcting the ownership of files and securing permissions to minimise any impact the changeover will have, we will also be creating php.ini files and copying settings from .htaccess files where applicable. This will take us a little time to work through and would appreciate your patience whilst we make the changes to help further secure our hosting environment.

If you do install scripts in your account it’s very important that you keep them up to date by installing the latest patches available, the developers release the patches to not only improve the software but to also to fix security holes.

MySQL 5
The upgrade to MySQL 5 will bring performance gains and new features, MySQL 5 will be the only version of MySQL running across our servers.

MySQL 5 has been available for several years and is now the standard, recommended version. Any modern script that uses databases should work properly however we recommend that you check with the authors of any scripts on your site to verify that they are compatible.

Kind Regards,

Support Team

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