We are excited to announce that, as part of our ongoing commitment to provide our clients with the best possible hosting environment, we have upgraded the default PHP version for all newly created accounts from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.1. This update ensures that our customers benefit from the latest improvements in performance, security, and features available in PHP.

Key Benefits of PHP 8.1 over PHP 7.4:

1. Performance Enhancements: PHP 8.1 offers significant performance improvements over PHP 7.4, allowing your websites to load faster and respond more quickly to user interactions.

2. Improved Security: PHP 8.1 introduces several security enhancements, providing a more secure environment for your websites and applications.

3. New Features: PHP 8.1 includes various new features such as enums, readonly properties, fibers for better concurrency, and the new never return type. These additions will help developers write more efficient and cleaner code.

4. Deprecation Cleanup: PHP 8.1 has deprecated and removed outdated functions and features, encouraging developers to adopt modern coding practices and reduce the risk of potential issues in the future.

PHP Selector in cPanel:

While we strongly recommend taking advantage of the benefits offered by PHP 8.1, we understand that some clients may need to use a different PHP version for specific projects or compatibility reasons. To cater to these requirements, you can still select any PHP version using the PHP Selector in your cPanel account. This tool allows you to easily switch between different PHP versions and manage their respective settings as needed.

We encourage all customers to consider upgrading their existing websites and applications to PHP 8.1 to enjoy its performance, security, and feature enhancements. However, please thoroughly test your websites and applications for compatibility before switching to avoid any potential issues.

Compatibility Notice: Elite Module for WHMCS Limited to PHP 7.4

As you take advantage of the benefits offered by PHP 8.1, please note that our Elite Module for WHMCS is currently only compatible with PHP 7.4. We understand the importance of compatibility, and our team is actively working on updating the module to ensure compatibility with PHP 8.1 in the near future.

In the meantime, if you are using our Elite Module for WHMCS, we recommend you continue using PHP 7.4 for your WHMCS installation.

You can easily select PHP 7.4 for your WHMCS instance using the PHP Selector in your cPanel account. This will ensure that your WHMCS installation continues to function smoothly without any compatibility issues.

We appreciate your understanding and patience while we work on updating the Elite Module for WHMCS to be compatible with PHP 8.1. We will notify you as soon as the updated module is available for use with PHP 8.1, so you can enjoy the full range of benefits provided by the latest PHP version.

Yesterday, we faced many support tickets due to an issue with the MailChannels SMTP relay. This affected all outbound emails from our servers, causing delays in mail delivery.

Support is understandably bombarded when an incident of this scale occurs, even when it's outside our control. This heavily impacts not only our ability to respond quickly via support but also takes our attention away from the incident itself, adversely affecting communication and resolution of the issue.

As such, we have since been working on a simple but effective way of improving communications during such incidents - whilst rare, we want to ensure that not only are you able to see updates as frequently as we have them available but also see them at a point before opening a ticket.

We do, wherever possible, update our status page; however, in scenarios like yesterday, it wasn't feasible for us to provide updates as frequently as we would like due to the many received tickets regarding the matter.

Moving forward, we will post incidents to the support system, which will show similar to the following...

The colour of the notice will change depending on the incident type...

Additionally, we will continue to post about the incident until the matter is resolved. Once resolved entirely, the notification will then be removed.

Of course, you can still reach out to the support team as usual. However, we feel it's essential to present this information to you before you reach out.

The incident system will typically only be used for issues of significance, such as the one which took place yesterday. These would generally be outages lasting longer than 15 minutes or something that has a widespread impact.

We will not post incidents for minor window outages, as these are automatically indicated at the top of the support page (and in real-time on our status page) here...

We are incredibly pleased to announce the long-awaited release of our overhauled Cloud Servers!

Our VPS offering has come to feel a little clunky and outdated over the last few years. Whilst our existing platform has proved incredibly stable, we were running our virtual server nodes on somewhat legacy hardware, which we will be phasing out within the next few months.

The new platform has been built on the same hardware as our incredible 'B-Cloud' environment that runs our shared hosting platform - powered by 100% NVMe storage, DDR4 ECC RAM, and AMD EPYC Processors; this is quite the uplift which will introduce significant performance and stability benefits to our cloud server / VPS server plans!

The existing platform had several flaws, which we wanted to iron out as part of introducing our new cloud server platform. We are pleased to confirm the new systems are live and operational - we have been swamped behind the scenes getting ready for launch!

So, what's changed?!

Well, it's probably easier to say what hasn't! We have overhauled every aspect of the platform, introducing the following new benefits...

• AMD EPYC CPU

• 100% NVMe Storage

• Hourly Billing

• New Pricing Plans

• A completely new User Interface / Portal for managing Cloud Servers

• Off-site Backups

• IPv6 Compatibility

• Windows Server 2019 / 2022

General Purpose Servers

Our general purpose plans have been designed to suit a wide range of workloads and environments, from as little as just £5 per month.

Enterprise Servers

We have been bombarded with requests from clients who require more extensive plans than those offered, which only allowed us to scale up to 2TB of storage and around 24 CPU cores.

Our new Enterprise Servers now offer scalability up to a whopping 256GB RAM and almost 4TB of NVMe storage!

Suitable for any workload or environment, our platform is now a cost-effective home for your most prominent projects and servers.

Cloud Server Portal:

OK, hardware improvements are fantastic, but how about a more granular platform that allows you to spin up, destroy, and resize servers instantly? We got you!

Deploy your virtual infrastructure in just seconds using our incredibly intuitive portal. Create, resize, and destroy servers from a single, easy-to-use interface. Choose from one of the available Operating Systems, or deploy from one of our pre-built applications/templates.

Instantly Deploy Applications:

It is now possible to instantly install pre-configured installations of applications and control panels, such as cPanel or Plesk.

Team Members and Collaboration:

You can now invite additional users to your projects, allowing them access to either all or a restricted set of your cloud servers.

Project Organisation:

Organise your servers into 'Projects'. Move servers between projects, and remove them when they are no longer required.

Scheduled Backups:

Secure, off-site backups are available for your cloud servers at the click of a button, and can be scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly. Backups are an additional charge of just 20% of the cost of the server.

SSH Key Management:

Usage Reporting and Graphs:

See instantly and in real-time the usage of any cloud server.

Granular Control:

In the event of a disaster, you can boot into a recovery ISO to manage your server. You also have control over power management, password reset, and instant access to your server's console.

Resize your Cloud Instances:

Need additional resources temporarily? Now you can scale your cloud server to an alternative plan in just a few clicks!

To get started, click the new 'Manage Cloud Servers' option from within our client area...

From there, you will be provided with the option to view the terms of the service, and once accepted, you will have access to the following portal...

From this interface, you can see an overview of any active servers you have and can also click directly through to the Cloud Portal to create, manage or destroy any machines.

Oh, did we mention?!

On our previous VPS platform, provisioning time for a server took around 5-6 minutes. The new platform, a newly deployed OS, takes as little as 17 seconds!

We hope you love using the new platform as much as we have enjoyed getting things ready! These are some very welcome, fantastic additions to our tools and services.

If you have any questions, feel free to send a ticket to sales@brixly.uk, where we would be happy to answer any questions you have!

Warmest regards,

Dennis Nind

We have offered LSMCD as part of our hosting services for the past few years. However, the LSMCD service is a fork of 'Memcached', which utilises SASL for authentication, and has, in all honesty, been problematic!

The issue is upstream, and whilst we have pestered Litespeed for a permanent solution to the SASL issues, these are yet to be provided!

As such, we are incredibly pleased to finally announce the long-awaited release of Redis, our custom-built cPanel plugin, which provides comparable functionality with full compatibility with the LSCache plugin, but without the need for SASL / authentication.

In addition, the Redis instance is created 'within' the cPanel user via a custom socket, which means the environment remains secure and retained within the LVE constraints of your cPanel user account.

We have added an article on how to set this up here...

https://support.brixly.uk/en/knowledgebase/article/enable-object-caching-with-redis

How to install Redis for LSCache:

The first thing to do is to navigate to Redis in cPanel:

Once within the Redis tool, enable it for your account:

Once enabled, copy the Redis socket path, as we will need this later! You can always return to this screen if you need to view this again.

Now we need to enable the Redis extension; this is allowed under cPanel -> Select PHP Version -> Extensions -> Redis

Once enabled, we can log in to WordPress and access the LiteSpeed Cache.

Under Cache -> Object, we can find the settings for enabling Redis:

The settings we need to enable here are:

• Change Object Cache from Off to On

• Switch Method to Redis

• Set the Host to be the socket path noted down earlier

• Change port to 0

Once done, hit save, and the Redis cache should be ready!

Introducing LSCache Presets for WordPress: the easiest way to optimize your WordPress site using the Litespeed Cache plugin.

Litespeed Cache Presets are a pre-tuned set of options, which can be used for optimizing any WordPress site using Litespeed Cache. You can configure your ideal level of optimization with just a few clicks!

All servers have now been updated to the latest version of Litespeed, allowing support for the new functionality.

In the WordPress Dashboard, you can find Presets under the LiteSpeed Cache menu.

If you don’t see it, make sure you’re using v5.3 or higher of the plugin.

Some key details are sent in a welcome email when you sign up for a reseller service. However, those details were previously unclear from within the client area, and the feedback received was that the information was difficult to find.

As such, we have made changes to improve the user experience, simplifying access to critical details about your hosting plan.

We have now added a 'View Account / Server Details' tab on the Product Detail page...

When clicking this button, a list of crucial information will be provided in a clean, simple and intuitive table...

We hope you find the change helpful, however, if you have any suggestions feel free to let us know!

As requested through our feedback site, we now display the account details which a Resource Boost+ is associated with directly from the 'Services -> List Services' page.

We have removed a number of domain extensions from our services, as they are no longer available upstream from our suppliers.

In addition, selected TLDs have had their pricing changed in line with our supplier's recent pricing revisions. Many extensions have reduced in cost, whereas some may have increased.

For a number of the most common TLDs, such as .com and UK-based domains, we have kept the pricing the same as before.

You can review our domain pricing list here...

https://client.brixly.uk/cart.php?a=add&domain=register

We have also introduced the ability to register domain names for up to 10 years, whereas some previously were only available for 1-2 years.

If you are a reseller, then a list of our domain pricing can be found here...

Client Area -> Reseller Tools -> Domain Pricing

You will also be able to dump an export of all extensions and their pricing.

We have updated our cPanel Licencing prices for VPS and dedicated servers inline with the upstream changes in pricing by cPanel, introduced in October 2022.

https://support.brixly.uk/en/knowledgebase/article/cpanel-license-pricing

The pricing can be found on the article above, and will be applicable only to VPS or dedicated server clients.