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

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.

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.

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.

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 Balances can be withdrawn by PayPal or as credit for your own hosting once your affiliate commissions reach $100.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/

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 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.

Here’s a spy shot of the construction to tide you over:

2011 was extremely kind to our business and we would like to share with you our highlights from the past year and thank you for your continued support.

- Like every year before it, 2011 was our biggest and best year. Our sales grew substantially over last year which we attribute to a lot of hard work, increased networking efforts, and the diminishing effect of the worldwide economic recession. A big thank you to our clients!

- We moved into a wonderful co-working space called The Two Twenty in September. We love it so much here that we will be expanding into a larger suite in the building later in the year. Check out a video tour of the building that was filmed during the wild grand opening party that was held in November.

- To celebrate the 8 year anniversary of our web hosting division, we revamped our hosting plans giving all customers a free upgrade featuring as much 5x the resources. We also implemented new hosting technologies in order to improve server stability and performance.

- We acquired our second hosting business in April, purchasing the customers of Collision Hosting, a small US firm.

- We launched Ominocity, a local music blog with accompanying iPhone and Android apps in March.  6 months later Ominocity was voted as Best Local Website in Planet S Magazine’s “Best of Saskatoon” reader poll.

- Varial was a sponsor again to the massive Halifax Pop Explosion music festival and also sponsored the YYJ Freelance Camp and BarCamp Saskatoon networking events. Ominocity staff even gave the closing presentation at BarCamp Saskatoon!

Along with sponsoring the event, members of our staff will be giving the talk “How to Create an Award-Winning Blog in 6 Months” at BarCamp Saskatoon tomorrow from 12pm-9pm at VendAsta. If you will be attending the event, be sure to check out our presentation!