Hello everyone,

We have some exciting news to share - cPanel PHP 8.1 is now available for production! 

This upgrade from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.1 brings many new features, better security and huge performance improvement.

For full details on all the new features and improvements in PHP 8.1, please see the release notes at https://www.php.net/releases/8.1/en.php.

If you're already running cPanel PHP 7.4, upgrading to PHP 8.1 is easy. 

Simply log into your cPanel account, scroll down to Software, select the "MultiPHP Manager" icon, and then select PHP 8.1 from the menu. 

Your site will be automatically updated to use the new version of PHP.

For a detailed walk-through on how you can upgrade to PHP 8.1 (or stick with PHP 7.4 should you need it but without the risk and without needing to rewrite your code), please visit https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/announcements/51/Whats-Happening-Next-with-PHP-7.4-and-Your-cPanel-Hosting-Account.html

A website that helps you achieve business goals, is the kind of website that every website owner wants to have.

For that to happen, it has to be a highly-optimized website.

This is especially true for WordPress websites.

You need a WordPress website that is known for its speed, performance, and security. 

These will of course lead to better rankings and visibility within organic search results.

It is for this reason that we have enabled a 1-click WordPress CMS Site Optimization capability for all customers hosting WordPress on our web hosting platform.

It is free.

It is automatic.

It is part of your cPanel server and understands your website better.

There is no need to go a-fiddling with 3rd-party optimization plugins that often create more problems than they solve.

There is no learning curve.

It is simply the best non-code method to make your WordPress site optimization effort faster and smarter.

Customers have seen their WordPress website performance boosted by over 300%.

Visit our blog to see how to get this enabled for your Web Hosting Magic WordPress hosting account.

If you have received within the past 48 hrs a notification such as this:

Updates were not installed for the following items: Website "/home/$username/public_html" (https://$domain.com): Failed to reset cache for the instance #1: WordPress Toolkit was not able to finish running an operation on this site in 60 seconds, so the operation was terminated. This could mean that your WordPress installation might be infected with malware. Check the wp-config.php file of the installation for potential malware code or run an anti-virus scan. If you cannot find any traces of malware, try running the operation again later.

it is likely because of an existing issue with WordPress Toolkit.

By default, the cPanel WordPress Toolkit plugin automatically checks your WordPress website daily for malware infection.

It turned out that as presently coded, WordPress Toolkit creates a false match if it could not verify WordPress file checksums via api.wordpress.org or if api.wordpress.org is unavailable or inaccessible.

For now, the workaround is as follows:

Log in to your cPanel.

Visit WordPress Toolkit.

You will see something like this:

Click on Check WordPress Integrity

Click the "Verify Checksum"

Once the checksum check is completed, you will see this:

Close the pop-up.

Now click on "Refresh".

You will notice that the issue has gone away.

If you are unable to do this by yourself, please contact our technical support team at https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/submitticket.php

It is also worth noting that you can install WordPress using other methods including

• Softaculous WordPress Manager
• WP-CLI
• or manual WordPress installation

If you wish to use either of these instead of WordPress Toolkit and are not sure where to start, please do visit and create a technical support request and create request.

The cPanel WordPress Toolkit development team is aware of this problem and working on a permanent fix.

We are also following the issue.

Customers will receive an email notification when a solution is published in the product

To continue providing this all-around 24 hrs technical support, we have added a Phoenix-based ISO 9001 & ISO 27001-certified, GDPR-compliant first responder team as additional engineers.

As an existing or new customer, just visit https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/submitticket.php and select the Technical Assistant & Analysis team whenever you want something to get done.

As long as the issue is hosting account related (and not the management of website content), our team will work to help you get it done.

This expanded service starts on August 1st, 2022 and we are looking forward to helping you get things done.

Thanks for choosing Web Hosting Magic, and for helping us get to this point.

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

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

On our web hosting platform, there are several ways customers can log in to cPanel, WHM, or Plesk.

You can either access:

• cPanel & WHM at Port 2083 and 2087 respectfully
• Plesk Admin at Port 8443
• SSH via Port 22
• or via our billing system single sign-on

Single sign-on enables you to access your active services such as cPanel and Plesk hosting accounts directly from the Client Area.

Today, we want to let you know that the single Customer Dashboard to cPanel or Plesk sign-on has been re-designed. 

To take a look at it and/or access cPanel or Plesk, visit your services at https://dashboard.webhostingmagic.com/clientarea.php?action=services and you will see this interface:

Once you log in and need to log in to cPanel, WHM, or Plesk, click on the Manage option to automatically access your cPanel, WHM, or Plesk servers.

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.

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:

• 1Password Password Generator
• Dashlane Password Generator

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.

Picture this!

You have spent years, tons of time, and money creating a website.

But technology evolves.

As it does, you discover that the PHP version the website is using is no longer compatible with the website framework, the plugins/extensions, and/or theme/templates.

You took a look, ran some tests, and lo and behold, the website goes down every time you switch to a new upstream supported PHP version.

Kinda a dilemma you find yourself in, huh.

And to make things even more tricky, you see no clear upgrade path.

Today, we are reaching out to tell you that there is an option.

You see, we have been providing a service called HardenedPHP hosting service.

Our HardenedPHP supports using older versions of PHP.

This service is capable of hosting (at the time of this writing):

• PHP 4.4.9 (not really recommended to be used for any production website but available if you must)
• PHP 5.1
• PHP 5.2
• PHP 5.3
• PHP 5.4
• PHP 5.5
• PHP 5.6
• PHP 7.0
• PHP 7.1
• PHP 7.2
• PHP 7.3
• PHP 7.4
• PHP 8.0
• PHP 8.1

But there is more.

This service also patches these PHP versions against known vulnerabilities.

That means no script re-writes.

No website breakage with a forced upgrade.

All without compromising your website security.

If you ever have the need for the service, check out and use our HardenedPHP hosting packages to ensure maximum security and flexibility.