This announcement is related to our upcoming work on all shared/reseller servers to enable suphp as previously discussed in our forum here : http://www.clook.info/forum/showthread.php?t=7924 (forum account required and activated as a customer in our client area).

We will be carrying out this change on chad.clook.net on the evening of 11th March 2010. After this server is complete we will be leaving a period of time to check all is okay before continuing with the rest of the shared servers which will be announced separately 1-2 weeks later.

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This is quite a large scale change but we'd first like to reassure all clients that in the vast majority of cases there will be no difference and the work will be un-noticable. In fact, we have been running suphp on our newest shared hosting servers for some months now with ZERO problems or issues. This announcement is aimed at highlighting some of the slight differences when PHP is running in a suphp environment.

1. Permissions (WILL BE HANDLED BY US)

With suphp it will not be possible to make insecure permission settings to scripts such as 777 world writable. Any PHP files should be set to 644 (or less) with directories set to 755 (or less). This is a much more secure hosting environment and any changes to permissions or ownership required on existing scripts will be handled by us as part of the work.

2. .htaccess php rules (WILL BE HANDLED BY US)

At the moment it is possible to change some php options by using a line in a .htaccess file such as "php_value option x" or "php_flag option x". This will no longer be possible after the suphp install and any php options will need to be configured in a file called php.ini using the syntax 'option_name = "value"'. Once again, we will take care of converting lines of .htaccess files to php.ini files at the time of the work.

3. Account quotas

To date, any files created using a PHP script have been under Apache ownership and not counted towards the user account quota. This will change and all quotas will be much more accurate after the work which is a major benefit for account accuracy and when clients with to modify files created using scripts via FTP which will be possible without issue with suphp.

4. Joomla

For any clients using Joomla, it is important to have the $live_site variable configured with the domain of the account. Most installs should already have this set but it's worth taking a few seconds to check before this work is done.

If anyone has any questions please feel free to contact us at help@clook.info