News Updates – DigitalOrphans

Server Migration Notice to Websrv06

Posted on March 31, 2024 by Matt Simpson

From a performance perspective, websrv05 has been great for us. That said, I knew it would be a relatively short run on it, given that it is running the CentOS 7 Linux operating system, which is officially end-of-life in June 2024.

Today, I am announcing our upcoming migration to websrv06!

Like its predecessor, websrv06 is super fast (40 CPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 4 TB of RAID 1 storage). It runs PHP 8.3 and MariaDB 10.11 for excellent website security and performance, and it is running the latest version of Plesk 18 for a great web hosting management experience.

The migration of accounts will start this week and will be finished by the end of April. Once the migration of your account is complete, I will send you an email notification to let you know.

As with our last migration, you should notice much or any downtime during the migration process.

Keep Informed of Urgent Updates

I recently socialported from Twitter/X over to Mastodon for all urgent hosting-related updates. For the latest urgent updates, please follow @digitalorphans@mastodon.social.

Known Issues

Annoying Could not issue/renew Lets Encrypt certificates Emails
Once your account has been migrated, you may receive Lets Encrypt notifications with the subject of “Could not issue/renew Lets Encrypt certificates.” These are sent from the old server and can safely be ignored. They may continue until all domains have been migrated; I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Incoming/Outgoing Mail Server Changes
Some people have had to set their incoming/outgoing mail server in their email client (e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird) to websrv05.digitalorphans.org to avoid TLS certificate errors. If this is you, you will have to change your incoming/outgoing mail server to websrv06.digitalorphans.org.

This issue will not affect most people, as most have correctly set their incoming/outgoing mail servers to their domain name (e.g., silentweb.ca, mattsimpson.ca).

Websites Requiring PHP 7.4
Unfortunately, PHP 7.4 is way past end-of-life and will not be supported on websrv06. We will be transitioning all sites to PHP 8.3 during the migration process. This change may negatively impact some older PHP-based websites. If you notice any issues with your PHP-based website, please feel free to let me know, and I will try to help you.

Server Migration Notice for websrv05

Posted on December 28, 2022March 23, 2024 by Matt Simpson

Today, there is some exciting news to share! At some point over the next month, we will be migrating all hosting accounts on websrv04 to their new home on websrv05. This new server is substantially faster (40 CPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 9 TB of storage), and you will notice a nice speed improvement for your service as a result. PHP 8.1 and 8.2 are also available, and MariaDB has been upgraded to version 10.5.

Once the migration of your account is complete, you will receive an email notification, and you will be able to log into Plesk on the new server.

As with our last migration, there should not be much or any downtime during the migration process, but if you encounter issues, please let us know directly.

PHP Version Upgraded

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Matt Simpson

A brief notice to inform users on websrv04 that if you were using an unsupported version of PHP (7.1 – 7.3), your website has been automatically migrated to PHP 7.4 this evening. However, most people can safely switch to PHP 8.1, so please do so within Plesk at your convenience.

Email Server Changes on websrv04

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Matt Simpson

On Saturday, October 10th, I will be making a relatively significant change to email services on my websrv04 hosting server. This change involves migrating the mail server software in use from QMail+Courier to Postfix+Dotcove and changing the spam/virus protection component from MagicSpam to Plesk Email Security Pro.

This migration will result in mail services being offline for a short period of time (< 30 minutes). It may also result in your local email client (e.g., Outlook, Apple Mail, Spark, etc.) re-downloading all of your messages when the migration is complete.

Plesk & PHP Updates on websrv04

Posted on March 7, 2020 by Matt Simpson

The SMTP issue that we were experiencing last night after the Plesk upgrade has now been resolved. The issue was caused by a strict TLS Cipher setting I set after the upgrade, and was in no way related to the upgrade itself.

Take a moment to log into Plesk and have a look around. Plesk 18 is great, and I also made PHP 7.4 an option last night as well.

Service Interruption: Update

Posted on March 7, 2020March 7, 2020 by Matt Simpson

Please note that the majority of the Plesk upgrade and kernel patching was successful; however, we are currently experiencing an issue with outgoing mail (SMTP) at this time. Plesk support is investigating the issue, and I will post an update as soon as this is resolved. For more information, please follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/digitalorphans

Service Interruption

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Matt Simpson

Please excuse the 10 minute service interruption on websrv04 this evening as the system is rebooting in order to apply a patch.

Plesk & PHP Updates on websrv04

Posted on March 4, 2019March 4, 2019 by Matt Simpson

Plesk 17.8 Upgrade

Plesk server control panel on websrv04 will be upgraded this weekend
to version 17.8. This upgrade will result in some periodic downtime on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. No significant outages are expected; however, please check @digitalorphans on Twitter for updates.

PHP 7.2 Migration

PHP 5.6 has long been end-of-life’d and it will be removed from websrv04
this spring. Websites actively running PHP 5.6 will upgraded to PHP 7.2 over the next few weeks. If special attention is required in your case, please let us know.

Account Migration is Complete

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Matt Simpson

The transition to websrv04 has now officially been completed. All resellers, clients, and sites have been moved and users are encouraged to log into Plesk to checkout the new features of the server. We now support PHP 7.2 and Node.js, the server comes equipped with advanced spam filtering and automatic IP blacklisting for multiple failed login attempts. Your domain names are also now equipped with the ability to automatically load in a valid TLS/SSL certificate thanks to Let’s Encrypt.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Account Migration Has Started

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Matt Simpson

Just a brief note to mention that I have transferred 49 domains from websrv03 to the new websrv04 server tonight. This is going to be a bit of a slower process than I originally hoped, but the migration utilities provided by the Plesk platform are pretty amazing. As a reminder, I will e-mail you when your account has been transferred over. If you encounter any issues after the migration, please be sure to let me know right away.