Site Migrations Update 2018-12-02

You may have noticed that the security screen we’d previously used to protect your WordPress login form is no longer displayed. We’re using some additional methods to secure your site and this is no longer needed.

The previous method masked the Register link found on the login form from the general public, and now some of our members are now seeing user registration from the public and are wondering where that is coming from.

The configuration to disable public registration can be found at Settings >> General in your WordPress control panel. Uncheck the Membership box labeled Anyone can register and click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen.

Support
Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions about your site migration or any area of your service.

Site Migrations Update 2018-11-29

We’ve been able to successfully migrate all of our active customers to our new hosting platform. There are a few new features and some small changes we would like to make you aware of.

Free SSL Certificates
First, all websites are now capable of operating under SSL (HTTPS) for greater security. As Google is beginning to favor SSL-enabled websites in its search results, it’s becoming more prevalent for sites to serve content over HTTPS. Our platform allows you to provision a free SSL certificate, which formerly could cost over $100. We will be happy to help you enable SSL and switch your website to HTTPS; please just open a ticket we will be glad to make this change for you.

LiteSpeed Cache
Also some of you may have noticed that there is a new plugin in your blog, the LiteSpeed Cache plug-in (we’ve removed any other caching plugins, they are no longer necessary). Our servers now use the most recent version of LiteSpeed Web Server, a powerful commercial web server. LiteSpeed accelerates your site and allows it to serve content faster and more securely than the standard Apache Web server. The LiteSpeed Cache plugin in WordPress integrates tightly with the LiteSpeed Web server and allows your site to scale to serve many more more visitors than other web server solutions.

Most of you will be happy with the settings we configured for LiteSpeed Cache. However, if you are experiencing any difficulties please open a ticket and will be glad to fine tune the settings for your specific needs. For sites that use a Mobile theme, we may need to enable certain settings, so please open a support ticket if you have any questions or concerns about your LiteSpeed Cache.

Disk Space
We’ve doubled the amount of storage available in each plan. Enjoy.

Disk SpaceOriginalNew
Bronze1 GB2 GB
Silver2 GB5 GB
Gold5 GB10 GB

CloudLinux
One change it is also important to note is that our servers now use the CloudLinux operating system. CloudLinux allows us to control more tightly how many resources each account uses and ensures that it is never possible for any one site take all the resources away from any other site, which is typically a common criticism.

Every site is now guaranteed a certain number of CPU cores of processing power:

 CPU Cores
Bronze1
Silver2
Gold4

We’re essentially providing you with the ease and simplicity of a shared hosting plan, but with the scalability and reliability of a full-blown VPS server.

For most of our customers there will be no change in your site performance; in fact your site performance will increase due to the more modern hardware powering your site. However for a very small number of users who have highly-trafficked sites, please contact us if you’re seeing any slow down in the performance of your site and we we will work you to transition your site to a plan offering more CPU resources to power your site.

Coming soon is the ability to pool your sites, and purchase a pool of resources (CPU, disk space) and distribute them across multiple sites. If you’re currently hosting multiple sites with us or would like to add additional WordPress sites to your portfolio, we’d love to to start putting some of you into these “pool plans” so please feel free to reach out if this is of interest.

Support
Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions about your site migration.

Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service; we’re really excited about these developments and for more to come in 2019!

Site Migrations 2018-11-01

Thank you for your patience, at last we are ready to begin migrations of all accounts to our new hosting platform.

Our new platform will continue to be based on Plesk, so all of your existing accounts and passwords will migrate as-is, but this newer version of Plesk and the underlying hardware, software, and infrastructure updates will offer:

  • increased security
  • improved and guaranteed performance
  • free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt
  • more current versions of PHP

There’s more to come, especially for those of you with multiple sites, but the first phase will be to migrate all sites to the new platform by the end of November.

Your domain name registration
If your domain name is not registered with us at either PressHarbor or Rackshare, you WILL need to make changes at your registrar or DNS service, so now would be a great time to ensure that you have login information handy and are prepared to make changes via the service through which you registered your domain (or manage your DNS).

What do I need to do
We expect to begin migrations Saturday November 3, migrating the larger, more highly trafficked sites first. We will send you an email notice prior to migrating your site.

If you can provide us with a 24-72 hour window to migrate your site, preferably several of them, we will do our best to honor your request. Longer windows are even better. So if you know you won’t be creating content on your site for a few days, let us know when that will be and we will try to migrate you site during that timeframe.

We will make every effort to migrate your site during your preferred window, but the earlier you reach out to us the better. As we wind down to the end of November, we expect to have less opportunity to manage to your preferences and will need to perform the migrations at our convenience.

Please submit a support ticket: http://bit.ly/yQD0yH

and share with us your preferences and best windows and we will do our best to honor them. Please make a note in your ticket if you are using any email accounts or webmail on your site so that we can plan accordingly.

Will there be downtime?
No, we don’t expect your site will become unavailable at any time. By providing us with a window where you do not expect to create new content, we will be able to perform the migration and DNS changes during this window to ensure your site remains available to the public at all times.

Thank you
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service, we’re really excited about the next phase of our service and thank you for joining us on this journey!

WordPress 4.9.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.9.1, which was released November 29, 2017. For more information about WordPress 4.9, please see the original WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” release announcement.

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.

Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.8.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.8.1, which was released August 2, 2017. For more information about WordPress 4.8, please see the original WordPress 4.8 “Evans” release announcement.

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.

Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.7.2 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.7.2, which was released January 26, 2017. For more information about WordPress 4.7, please see the original WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan” release announcement.
For a visual tour of the new features in this release, please watch the following video:

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.5.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.5.1, which was released April 26, 2016. For more information about WordPress 4.5, please see the original WordPress 4.5 “Coleman” release announcement.
For a visual tour of the new features in this release, please watch the following video:

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.4.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.4.1, which was released January 6, 2016. For more information about WordPress 4.4, please see the original WordPress 4.4 “Clifford” release announcement.
For a visual tour of the new features in this release, please watch the following video:

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.3.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.3.1, which was released September 15, 2015. For more information about WordPress 4.3, please see the original WordPress 4.3 release announcement.
For a visual tour of the new features in this release, please watch the following video:


We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!

WordPress 4.2.1 Upgrade Complete

All PressHarbor weblogs have been upgraded to WordPress 4.2.1, which was released April 27, 2015. For more information about WordPress 4.2, please see the original WordPress 4.2 release announcement.
For a visual tour of the new features in this release, please watch the following video:

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.
Thank you for your continued support of our PressHarbor service!