Wrench of the Monkey

Our Web Hosting services enable small and medium-size enterprises to earn cash using their sites. Having an Internet presence allows companies and individuals to take advantage of the World Wide Web.

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PHP 5.7 with all chances to become PHP 7

PHP is a living language and as such, it undergoes constant developments, experiments and upgrades. This is why, it is hard to predict how it will unfold within a year or even less.

A vivid example is PHP 6, which was well seen as the new official PHP release. However, it was soon brought to oblivion due to a contradiction among participating developers.

On the other hand, the PHP 5.7 dev version has managed to stand the test of time and is now considered a herald of the brand new PHP 7 series.

What happened to PHP 6?

PHP 6 first appeared in 2005 as a development project, which offered a brand new encoding approach by bringing Unicode into the PHP engine. According to the new approach, UTF-16 had to be used for internal encoding of everything inside the engine.

However, the excessive CPU time and memory entangled in the UTF-16 conversion (almost twice as much as with a UTF-8 string) made PHP 6 too complex and resource-consuming to implement.

Thus, PHP 6 never went out of its dev state and many of its worthy new features like the language-integrated Unicode support, etc. ended up landing in the PHP 5.x series.

Here’s what the PHP community had to say about it:

“PHP 6 was one of the biggest traumas in the php.net history. We have magisterially failed to define a clear roadmap, to find consensus on what it should be like, along with many other issues like small groups fighting one another or hidden meetings or developments.”

Why is PHP 5.7 the new official PHP candidate?

As PHP 6 was slowly assimilated by the PHP 5.x branch, the PHP community got some ‘fresh air’ and a strong push to release a new major release candidate – PHP 5.7, also known as PHPNG.

According to phpng developers, the key benefits of PHP 5.7 revolve around performance and memory utilization.

It has so far shown striking performance improvements over the current stable release PHP 5.6 and is about to become nearly 100% faster than PHP 5.6 when rendering the front page of a stock WordPress installation, for example. All that is achieved with no negative effect on its compatibility.

The secret to this performance supremacy is that nearly 60% of the CPU instructions have been “retired” and replaced by more efficient code. Before PHP 5.7, the only way to get performance like this was by using a HipHop Virtual Machine, which, however is hard to configure and lacks compatibility.

On account of its amazing practice scores, PHP 5.7 is anticipated to bring a tremendous performance boost to the servers around the world.

If PHP 6 was a trauma, the latter seems to have been cured by the excitement over PHPNG and its forthcoming transition into PHP 7.

Here is an official statement of the PHP community about the production release date:

“With key decisions about both the version number and the engine for PHP 7 behind us, it’s time to define an agreed-upon timeline so that all contributors can align around it. The purpose of this RFC is to define a one-year timeline for the delivery of PHP 7.0, with a projected release date of November 2015.”

How to use PHP 5.7 on our servers?

PHP 5.7 is now supported by most bundled extensions and our developers have updated it to the latest release on our servers. 

NOTE: Keep in mind that PHP 5.7 is still in development and is not recommended for use on production websites.

You can enable PHP 5.7 for your projects from the Advanced section of your Web Hosting Control Panel, under PHP Configuration:

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VPN quota upgrade options added to the Hepsia Control Panel

VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a handy security service with which you are already familiar. Since its launch one year ago, thousands of users seeking online privacy have leveraged its power to encrypt data and to secure it from prying eyes.

To help you take full advantage of the VPN access service, we have added monthly traffic and upload/download speed upgrade options to our Hosting Control Panel.  

Why use a VPN?

VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a service, which helps curb country-based website access restrictions on the otherwise ‘global’ Internet.

The VPN functionality allows you to re-route your traffic and to browse the web incognito from any place in the world.

This makes VPN a great solution for browsing content that is blocked in your area.

How to upgrade your monthly traffic quota?

By default, we allocate 5 GB of free monthly VPN traffic to all Hosting Control Panel-managed cloud hosting packages, Virtual Private Servers, semi-dedicated servers and dedicated servers.

If you need more than that, you can now upgrade your monthly allocation by adding extra GBs of traffic.

In the Control Panel, click on the Upgrades link in the top right corner and navigate to the monthly VPN traffic upgrade menu.

Then select the amount of extra traffic you’d like to avail of from the drop-down list. It will be added on top of the 5 GB of free traffic that you get each month by default.

For instance, if you exceed this month’s 5 GB, you can order additional 5 GB. Next month’s 5 GB you are entitled to will be refreshed and you will be able to use а total of 10 GB of VPN traffic.

How to upgrade your upload/download speed quota?

The default upload/download speed while connected to a VPN is 512 Kbps. If you are not satisfied with the loading rate, you can now freely upgrade it to get a faster VPN experience.

The upload/download speed upgrade option is right under the monthly VPN traffic upgrade option in the Upgrade table:

Click on the drop-down menu and select the desired upload/download speed.

How to make use of the VPN access service?

If you haven’t used our VPN servers to divert your Internet traffic so far, take the following steps:

Configure a new VPN connection through the VPN client you have installed on your device using one of our VPN server locations;

Select the PPTP connection protocol. We do not support other protocols on our VPN servers;

Fill in the username pertaining to your hosting account and your VPN password;

In the VPN Access section of the Control Panel, you will find a how-to video guide on setting up a VPN connection. 

That’s it! Now all of your Internet communication is encrypted and secured from eavesdropping.

Tip: To save traffic, you can also enable a VPN filter from the Control Panel, which will automatically filter out ads and compress images.

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A mail blacklist filtering option added to the Email Manager

mail security continues to be a great source of concern, as spammers get smarter in their strife to get hold of your mailbox. To help boost the resistance of our mail servers to the latest spamming techniques, we have made a considerable upgrade to our spam protection system.

Now all your mailboxes are shielded by an advanced blacklist filtering technology, which uses the latest mail server verification methods and which relies on reputable blacklist and grey-list database sources.

Also, you and your customers will be able to enable/disable the mail blacklist filtering option from the Web Hosting Control Panel.

How does mail blacklist filtering work?

A blacklist, also known as DNSBL (DNS Blacklist), is a real-time anti-spam database, which tracks blacklisted IP addresses, i.e. IP addresses of mail servers that have been reported for spamming activities. In contrast to the regular anti-spam protection where emails are filtered out when reaching your mailbox, a mail blacklist filter will block malicious emails before they even reach the recipient.

To verify if an email is coming from a blacklisted IP address, we now use a large reputable database, which includes a range of well-trusted DNS-based blacklists, greylists and additional spam lists. When the mail server receives an incoming email, the sender’s IP address is matched against the IPs listed in the database we are working with.

If the sender’s IP is listed on even one of the blacklists, the email coming from it will not be delivered to your mailbox. Thanks to the advanced real-time verification process, the target mail server, i.e. our mail server, will refuse to accept the message and will even block the initial network connection from the blacklisted address.

This way, it will be impossible for the blacklisted outgoing mail server to deliver the email to our mail server and your inbox will be fully safe from potentially malicious emails.

How to enable/disable the mail blacklist filtering option?

From the Web Hosting Control Panel, you can now enable/disable the newly improved mail blacklist filtering functionality on our mail servers with a click of the mouse.

In the Email Manager, just navigate to the Blacklists column and find the mailbox you want to enable/disable the blacklist filtering option for.

By default, the blacklist filtering option is enabled for all email accounts. If you want to disable it for a certain mailbox because you are sure that you only receive legitimate emails from trusted sources, then simply click on the green Blacklist icon:

If you want to later re-activate the blacklist filtering option, simply click on the red Blacklist icon.

Our newly refined mail blacklist filtering system guarantees better inbound spam protection and gives you and your customers another good reason to feel safe & sound on our web hosting platform.

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Our Control Panel is now more service upgrade-friendly

Our Hosting Control Panel has just undergone a major uplift to help our customers keep an eye on resource usage and give them a clear idea of what features their sites are hungry for in real time.

This will help you make an informed choice about which service(s) to upgrade and thus prevent any eventual downtimes.

Visual improvements to the resource usage table

Users often get lost amidst the tons of features and resources they are bombarded with. They know that you are a great provider offering what they need, but they rarely have a clear idea of how much is left in the basket of resources.

This is why, we've tried to add a more visual touch to the resource usage table by making it more graphically informative and bell-ringing. The main idea is to keep users informed of what they have used at any given moment, so that they will know what to upgrade when the time comes and before it’s too late.

The resource usage is visualized through different colors in the progress bar:

Four progress bar colors correspond to the following resource usage situations:

Grey – the user is taking advantage of up to ⅙ of the allocated resources;

Green – the user’s resource usage is within reasonable limits and they have nothing to worry about;

Orange – the user is reaching a critical resource usage level and is advised to upgrade in order to avoid full resource exhaustion;

Red – the user has already reached a critical resource usage level and is prompted to upgrade immediately. In this case the whole section is linked to the checkout form to ease the upgrade.

NOTE: The table of resources is updated in real time, so whenever there is an update to the usage status, it will be reflected in the table without the user needing to refresh the page.

Newly added section-specific resource usage bars

In addition to the improved resource usage table, which can be accessed from within all Control Panel sections, the users will also see small progress bars dedicated to a particular feature depending on the section they are in.

Visual improvements to the My Domain Names table

Apart from the resource usage table, we've also improved the visibility of the domain names table.

Through the use of different colors, users will now be more visually alerted of the expiring and expired domain names in their hosting account.

Also, users will now be able to renew their domains directly from the table, without needing to go to the Domain Manager beforehand. This is valid for both single and bulk domain renewals.

In the Domain Manager itself, users will also see progress bar alerts about domains that are nearing expiration or have already expired:

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Cloud Hosting with Wrench of the Monkey from Wrench of the Monkey on Vimeo.

Wrench of the Monkey presents Hosting by Wrench of the Monkey

We have made our own shared web hosting system having one particular aim at heart – to allow all of our customers make incredible websites without needing to worry about the hosting part. Wrench of the Monkey’s shared web hosting plans plans contain a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means you don’t need to worry about your web site going offline at all. Additionally, each of our shared web hosting plans plans is equipped with unlimited disk space, limitless monthly traffic and unmetered MySQL storage so your website will be able to expand easily without you having to worry about any sort of web hosting restraints. And you will get an absolutely free domain names registration with all of our shared web hosting plans packs.

Furthermore, all Wrench of the Monkey’s hosting plans we provide feature the Web Hosting Control Panel. Within this control panel there are actually all the software tools you’ll need for you to control your web site in one place, eliminating the need for any kind of billing panel interfaces. In addition, you will get access to lots of invaluable software tools: 1 Click App Installer, Site Generation Tool, Web Site Installer, 1 Click Framework Installer, sitemap generator and more.

Furthermore for each and every shared web hosting plan account, you choose your data center. Wrench of the Monkey offers shared web hosting plans throughout as many as three continents with the USA data center, UK data center, FI data center, East Europe data center and AU data center. Because of our skilled administrators, we will ensure a 99.9% network uptime for all the hosting services in any of them.