New Shared Hosting Environment - an Introduction

As we've mentioned previously, our shared hosting environment has a long overdue upgrade in the works. We're really getting close now, and we thought we'd offer a few technical details about the new environment and what to expect.

Some things will stay the same:

You'll be able manage your website in the same ways (SSH, SCP, SFTP),
Files within your account will look pretty much the same,
Your scripts will still run as your user in the context of your hosting account, as we describe on our "Advanced PHP" page,
You'll still have your own php.ini file to adjust as needed.

Some things will change a lot:

The new environment is based on Debian 5 and so all the system software is new:

PHP 5.2.6-1+lenny2 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2
Perl 5.10
Imagemagick 6.3.7
Ruby 1.8.7
Python 2.5.2
Vim 7.1
Graphviz 2.20.2

Since the new environment contains software several years newer than the old environment, a mass migration or "cut-over" isn't feasible, as older sites might be relying on older server software. So, our intention is to run the two environments side-by-side and allow site owners to decide when to switch. This complexity added a lot of engineering work, but it was required in order to ensure the smoothest possible migration path.

If you'd like to switch your site to use the new shared hosting environment ASAP and help us test its stability, we'll be able to do that in the next few weeks. Just let us know and we'll coordinate a switch-over with you.

-JM