Varial Technologies Blog

PHP 4 Removal Reminder

This is a reminder that we will be removing PHP 4 from our servers this evening as this discontinued version of PHP will no longer be supported by cPanel effective May 1, 2012.

For more information please see our previous blog post on this subject.

Testing of LiteSpeed Web Server

We have installed and are currently testing LiteSpeed Web Server on our Ares, Luna, and Poseidon servers in order to evaluate any performance benefits it may offer our customers in a variety of server environments.

LiteSpeed is the leading high-performance, high-availability web server that boasts being up to 9 times faster than Apache when serving static content, 3 times faster than Apache in SSL, and more than 50% faster than Apache when serving dynamic PHP content.

LiteSpeed is completely Apache interchangeable, meaning your websites will continue to work and function as they always have, but will hopefully load even faster!  If you encounter any issues please feel free to contact our Support department.  We’d also love to hear if you’ve noticed any performance improvements with your website since switching to LiteSpeed in the comments below.

We’ll post an update after our evaluation period if we decide to permanently switch to LiteSpeed and deploy it to the rest of our servers.

Self Service Firewall Unblocks

If you ever find yourself blocked by our firewall due to repeated login failures or other technical issues, it is now possible to unblock your IP without needing to contact our support department.

To do this, simply log into your client area account and click on the My Products and Services menu heading and then on the View Details button next to the domain you are having problems connecting to.  At the bottom of the page you’ll find the following form where you can unblock your own IP or the IP of one of your visitors.

If unblocking your IP does not resolve the issue for you, please contact our support department so we may look into the issue for you.

Ares – Network Connectivity Issue

We have just been informed of a networking issue affecting connectivity in the data center housing our Ares server.  Data center technicians are investigating the problem and we will provide more details as we receive them.

Please note that this issue affects clients hosted on our Ares server only.

Maintenance: Kernel Upgrades on Luna and Poseidon

Our Luna and Poseidon servers will be rebooted momentarily in order to apply an upgrade to their kernels.  Services will be offline for roughly 5 minutes as the servers reboot.  Thank you for your patience!

Introducing cPanel 11.32 and Logaholic Statistics

Last week we upgraded all of our servers to the latest version of cPanel which introduces many exciting new features as well as a new statistics application called Logaholic.

An overview of the new features available in cPanel 11.32 can be found on cPanel’s website and an introductory video of the new Logaholic web analytics software is available below.

Affiliate Program Launched

We are pleased to announce the launch of our public affiliate program where you can earn money by referring customers to Varial Hosting.

For every client you refer we’ll pay you a 10% recurring commission for as long as they remain a customer. Balances can be withdrawn by PayPal or as credit for your own hosting once your affiliate commissions reach $100.

Promote Varial Hosting on your website using one of our many banner ads and earn cold hard cash!

For more information or to sign up for our affiliate program please visit: http://www.varialhosting.com/about/affiliate/

Mailing Address Change

We’re all settled into our new office located in The Two Twenty, an arts and technology co-working hub in downtown Saskatoon and are hard at work improving our services and preparing new products to launch.

For our clients who are mailing in their payments we ask that you please send all future cheques to us at:

Varial Technologies, Inc.
#104 – 220 20th St W
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
S7M 0W9

Thank you for your cooperation!

PHP 4 to be Discontinued

As of May 1, 2012, PHP 4 will no longer be available as part of our web hosting platform.

PHP 4 has not been actively developed or supported by its developers for several years and cPanel has just issued an advisory stating that they will no longer support PHP 4 beginning in May.

All of our web hosting servers are currently configured to use PHP 5 by default. Several years ago we made PHP 4 available as a secondary option which clients had to manually enable in order to offer our customers a longer period of time to transition their applications to PHP 5.

The removal of PHP 4 from our web hosting platform will not affect the vast majority of clients as customers had to manually enable PHP 4 by adding a line of code to a special file in their hosting account in order to switch to using it.

If you had previously enabled PHP 4, please remove the following line of code from the .htaccess file in the public_html directory of your hosting account to switch back to using PHP 5:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php

Again, this action is only required if you had previously enabled your account to use PHP 4.

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact our Support department.

Maintenance: Kernel Upgrades on Apollo, Luna, and Poseidon

Our Apollo, Luna, and Poseidon servers will be rebooted momentarily in order to apply an upgrade to their kernels.  Services will be offline for roughly 5 minutes as the servers reboot.  Thank you for your patience!