We are going to be replacing the servers that host your website as part of our PHP4 web hosting cluster on the evening of 25th November 2008. As well as physical replacement, we are also changing the software we use, moving from FreeBSD to Centos Linux.

These changes will mean your website runs ontop of our “cloud computing” platform, built using VMWare, and as such we will be able to maintain our web servers, add new features and greater capacity more quickly in the future.

You should be aware that development for the PHP4 web language has now been officially ceased by the PHP community, and that we also now offer customers a new PHP5 web hosting cluster to use. Please contact the support team if you’re interested in migrating.

The new server cluster has been built with the following characteristics:

• CentOS 5.2
• Apache 2.2.9 + mpm-itk
• mod_php 4.4.9
• Perl 5.8.8 via CGI
• mod_perl 2.0.4
• Python 2.4.3 via CGI

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Whilst we expect the majority of web sites to continue working without any issues, it is important, because of the software changes, that you test your website as soon as possible to see if there are any problems that need to be addressed. To test your website on our new PHP 4 servers, you can take advantage of our test system by pointing your browser to http://www.yourdomain.com.v-web-php4.gradwell.net.

We will be switching off our current FreeBSD PHP 4 servers late on Tuesday 25th November 2008. Apart from ensuring compatibility, you do not need to make any changes to your site or DNS and there will only be a brief period of downtime to your website.