PHP4.4 End Of Life and Planned Removal

Web Hosting Magic has been offering HardenedPHP hosting packages that support PHP 4.4 for many years.

We have been doing that even after upstream stopped supporting it 13 years ago.

We felt that it is our obligation to assist customers still using old PHP versions to keep their website/application online while working towards an upgrade.

But the technology behind PHP 4.4 is now so outdated that it poses a significant risk not only to the customers using it but also to the systems that support it.

Thus, Web Hosting Magic will officially end support for PHP 4.4 on Jan 1, 2023.

This means that security vulnerabilities in PHP 4.4 will no longer be patched and the verison removed from our systems.

If you are still running an application that requires PHP 4.4, we highly recommend that you start looking around for a way to upgrade the app to work with either:

PHP 5.3
PHP 5.4
PHP 5.5
PHP 5.6
PHP 7.0
PHP 7.1
PHP 7.3

All the above PHP versions can ONLY be hosted in our Iowa data center.

PHP 7.4
PHP 8.0
PHP 8.1

Want to host a PHP application (even one running PHP5.6) securely?

You can ... with the HardenedPHP packages at https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/store/secure-php-hosting

Simplify Your Search Optimization Effort With cPanel SEO

We recently announced the availability of AccelerateWP, a tool you can use from your cPanel to accelerate and optimize your WordPress for speed.

Today, we are also announcing the availability of cPanel SEO.

As a product, cPanel SEO is designed to help our customers:

create more successful websites
find relevant keywords
optimize existing content
write great blog posts without hiring an SEO expert or overextending your budget
rank better in search engines such as Google, Microsoft, etc

To learn more about cPanel SEO visit https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/store/search-engine-optimization

If Your cPanel File Manager Is Showing Another Username

If you recently encountered a situation where your cPanel File Manager is showing another account's directory in the navigation pane, it might have something to do with the Settings.

The cPanel development team is aware of the issue and currently investigating it.

For a quick workaround, please visit the link at https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/knowledgebase/432/What-To-Do-When-Your-cPanel-File-Manager-Shows-Another-Username.html to see how to get it resolved.

Hourly & Daily Backup-as-a-Service Now Available To Customers

As humans, we are not particularly good at understanding probabilities.

Especially when it comes to guessing the odds of things that could happen in our lives.

Unpleasant things happen...

But uhmmm ... it happens to other people.

Until it happens to us.

The chances may be infinitely small.

But if the same conditions apply, we found ourselves in the same exact situation.

This is true for good things that one wishes happen to him, her, or them.

And also true when we fail to take steps to ensure business continuity even when the worst happens.

Events such as:

account compromise that stole an organization's data, emails, etc
malware infection that made their website a no-go area
or plain ol' carelessness that made it impossible to conduct business

can be devastating to any business.

And could any of this happen when you are hosting a website?

Yes, it could.

It could happen because we have seen customers ignoring easy-to-implement security recommendations.

A typical example would be when a customer ignores the recommendation to:

use a strong, unique password of at least 18 characters and made up of a combination of letters, numbers, cases, and symbols.
enable two-factor authentication on every cPanel or Plesk account you have with us
enable two-factor authentication on your billing account

As a customer, our security is extremely important to us.

It is why we keep reminding you of the need to take measures to better protect your accounts.

Yes, we

have systems in place to thwart automated password crackers
work with security partners to prevent brute-force attacks on your website/applications
do everything we can to protect your website from vulnerability exploitation (including 0-day attacks) & malware infections
etc

But none of these matters if you are using short, common passwords or dictionary words as passwords.

There are tools that could help you create passwords that will not be guessed by password cracking programs or bad guys.

Tools such as:

could help securely generate strong, unique passwords for each and every one of your accounts.

We have seen customers not bothering with back-ups.

Even when there are 3 different, easy-to-use self-service backup options.

We have seen customers not acting when our systems send a notification to update an application or its supporting resources (for example WordPress core, plugin, or theme).

Even when such an update is rolled out to patch security vulnerabilities.

To save us from ourselves, Web Hosting Magic is today announcing a daily backup-as-a-service.

We have been testing this service with several businesses with a need for hourly replication.

When purchased, the system backs up your data once every 24 hrs to a secure off-site location.

And as a customer, you too can take advantage of this service to stack the odds in your favor.

If anything happens, we restore your account with the exact copy of your data as it was within the past 24 hrs.

For those businesses with a need for hourly replication, we take a real-time snapshot of the data every hour.

If anything happens, we restore the exact copy of your data as it was within the past 60 minutes.

To take advantage of this offering, please visit https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/store/

To read more about the recommended steps, please visit https://blog.webhostingmagic.com/how-to-prevent-web-hosting-data-loss-or-compromise

Please, help us help you better.

Thanks and have a great week ahead.

cPanel's Paper Lantern Theme Deprecation

We understand that some of our customers prefer Paper Lantern because of its visual icons.

And until now, customers have had the ability to switch between the two themes that cPanel provides: Paper Lantern and Jupiter.

However, the cPanel team has deprecated the Paper Lantern theme.

So we will be switching all cPanel accounts to the new Jupiter theme on Friday, the 7th of February 2022.

If you would want to switch to Jupiter before then, please log in to your cPanel.

Take a look at the upper right side of the cPanel interface (the General Information panel).

You will be able to select Jupiter as your default cPanel theme from the drop-down menu.

You can read more about the Jupiter theme by visiting https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/announcements/23/Introducing--Jupiter-Our-New-cPanel--ThemeorStyle.html

As always, we're available 24/7 and will be here to assist you if you need help getting this done.

Please stay safe and healthy.

WordPress Toolkit Backup/Restore MySQL 8.0 Database Issue

It was recently discovered that databases with special functions in MySQL 8.0 fail to backup.

This is due to a change in MySQL 8.0 when handling specific types of data.

The MySQL documentation states the following:

Incompatible Change: Access to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.FILES table now requires the PROCESS privilege.
This change affects users of the mysqldump command, which accesses tablespace information in the FILES table, and thus now requires the PROCESS privilege as well. Users who do not need to dump tablespace information can work around this requirement by invoking mysqldump with the --no-tablespaces option.

This error is specific to users created under cPanel accounts, for use with applications (such as DB_USER variable in WordPress wp_config.php).

There is no known workaround to allow this to function in the WordPress Toolkit though the WordPress Toolkit developers are aware of the issue.

Until they release a solution for this issue, please use either:

PHPMyAdmin
cPanel's Backup Wizard or
Jetbackup

to take backups of MySQL databases of your WordPress websites.

WordPress Database Malware Infection Clean-up Made Simple

Database infections are destructive.

But even more so, they can be a persistent threat.

With over 30% of all malicious files caused by this kind of infection, cleaning them up can be very tasking to you, the website owner.

The vector of infection can be a situation:

where a developer copies and pastes a code without understanding what it actually does.
via an installed plugin or extension.
or a deliberate infestation that occurred because the website owner has not enforced available two-factor authentication and someone gains access to his or her system.

It doesn't matter how this happens.

One thing that is certain is that this often stays hidden and the authors can selectively call them to function without anyone being any wiser.

But even more so is that the account will stay compromised and will cause malicious files to keep on reappearing.

Today, we are announcing a Malware Database Scanner feature.

Our Malware Database Scanner gets to the bottom of such problems and eliminates those DB infections.

It is a solution designed to get to the bottom of the problems and eliminate those DB infections.

MDS automatically uses information from WordPress configuration files to get DB connection details for each CMS.

Then it safely and reliably backs up suspicious DB data ensuring that each step can be unmade in case an issue arises.

This happens 100% out of sight without you needing to do anything at all.

No SQL knowledge, no connection strings, passwords, etc needed.

For the moment, only WordPress databases are supported.

But it is good to know that all WordPress CMS hosted on our systems have access to this feature.

But the feature will be extended to include all content management systems (CMS) once released.

Please note that while this has been enabled, it is still a beta feature.

Our team (alongside the CL engineers) is closely monitoring its performance and hoping that it will help protect you even better.

If you noticed any odd database behavior, do let us support team know at once.

Thanks and have a beautiful and wonderful weekend.

How To Turn On ModPagespeed For Your Domain

mod_pagespeed, a Google web server module that automatically optimizes and boosts your site performance is now available to all web hosting accounts.

Web Hosting Magic mod_pagespeed web hosting

While it is available to be used, customers have to explicitly enable it on their domains and websites to start reaping its benefits.

Before enabling mod_pagespeed for any domain, we highly recommend that you double-check to ensure that it has a valid SSL/TLS certificate (which by the way is FREE to all web hosting accounts).

How To Turn On ModPagespeed For Your Website

To enable mod_pagespeed on your domain:

Select File Manager from the Files section.

Select the .htaccess file and click on Edit

If the file is not visible, configure File Manager to show hidden files.

If you are still unable to see a .htaccess file after toggling File Manager to show hidden files, then you need to manually create one.

Once you have opened your .htaccess file, add the following to the rule found at https://cdn.ordercloudserver.com/announcements/modpagespeed-on.txt to the file.

Save to close the file then visit the website to make sure that everything is OK.

How To Check To See If ModPageSpeed Working

You can easily verify it works either by:

reviewing the response headers via your favorite browser's Developer Tools

checking for the headers using the curl command:

curl -v --silent https://example.com/ 2>&1 | grep pagespeed

viewing your web page source code and looking for instances of "x-mod-pagespeed "
or using third-party tools such as https://securityheaders.com or https://www.sureoak.com/seo-tools/http-headers-checker to check the header and look for ModPagespeed.

ModPagespeed comes with standard core filters that are configured to be safe for most websites.

If you are adding additional filters, we assume that you understand the risk.

We highly recommend that you try everything out in a development environment before enabling mod_pagespeed on a live website.

If you discover after enabling mod_pagespeed that your website is having issues, please disable mod_pagespeed.

If you are not a customer yet, please visit our web hosting plans at ⁣dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/store/web-hosting-packages to gain access to a better web hosting service with mod_pagespeed.

How To Optimize Your PHP Website Using PHP X-Ray

The Web Hosting Magic team is happy to announce that our PHP optimization tool called PHP X-Ray has exited beta testing and is now available to customers.

You know that feeling you get when you have done everything you could to optimize your PHP website performance, and still, nothing seems to work.

As a good webmaster, you have gone through the code, done everything you could, and even reinstall the CMS software.

You just can't seem to nail the cause of the sluggish-performing website which can be because of:

poorly-coded plugins & theme
slow database queries
poorly-written code functionality
external calls
slow APIs
and even possibly spikes in website traffic.

The fact is that without a dedicated tracing tool that easily plugs into your CMS and analyzes the site to help you identify the root cause, resolving this might be like shooting in the wind and hoping something will stick.

Enter PHP X-Ray.

PHP X-Ray (located in the Software section) is a tool you can use to monitor and diagnose performance in content management systems (CMS) applications such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal easily without affecting uptime.

So instead of tediously combing through web application code and plugins, you can scan your website, identify performance bottlenecks in case of a slow website and resolve them swiftly.

How To Find Your Slow Website Issue Using PHP X-Ray

For accounts or hosting packages with PHP X-Ray enabled, all you need to do is to:

Log in to your cPanel and scroll down to Software.
Click on PHP X-Ray and when the page loads, create a tracing task. If you are unable to see the tool in Jupiter, please change your theme to paper_lantern.
Specify the site URLs or domains that have performance issues by selecting the domain from the drop-down list. To specify URL or wildcard, end-users should use the input field next to the domain. Please note that the URL option should be a valid URL of the domain that exists on your current hosting account. The field supports wildcard matching. Click How to use special characters to learn more about wildcard matching.
Click Run, then visit the site and perform an action.

For instance, you can submit a form on the site to perform a POST request, which will trigger PHP X-Ray data collection.

Now return to the tracing dashboard to review feedback.

You will see the task in the list of tracing tasks.

PHP X-Ray will sort requests by order of the slowest requests at the top so that you can prioritize issues.

View the Details page to get additional information about the performance issue and feedback on the root cause.

Let's say that a WordPress plugin is using extensive resources for the request, you will find the details on this page.

All you have to do is to disable the plugin in the CMS administrative dashboard.

Revisit the site, and performance should improve.

The Details page in the trace dashboard should also show no performance issues.

We hope that this will help you optimize your website without the need to spend a fortune on doing just that.

Not yet a customer yet?

Get one of our budget-friendly web hosting packages at www.webhostingmagic.com/pricing.html

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