How It’s Working - Page 12

As we look forward to 2016, it has become a bit of a tradition here at A2 Hosting to take a moment to look back on everything we’ve accomplished over the previous year. When looking back, it’s particularly satisfying to see the majority of our major accomplishments aligned directly with our overall goal; making sure you get the fastest page load speeds possible.

With the upcoming release of Drupal 8 on November 19th, Drupal users have something extra to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. After all, it’s been almost 5 years since the release of Drupal 7.0. While Drupal 7 included many improvements and new futures compared to its previous versions, the same can be said about Drupal 8. What are some of these improvements?

Google has begun to roll out algorithm updates intended to remove hacked site spam from their search results. The goal of these updates is to help keep their searchers and users safe by removing these potentially harmful sites from their search results.

It’s been just over a year since we launched A2 Optimized WordPress. The goal of A2 Optimized WordPress was to take the guesswork out of how to get the fastest page loads and most secure settings. It is safe to say A2 Optimized WordPress has been a success with optimized WordPress sites loading up to 6X faster than non-optimized sites. A2 Optimized WordPress is available on all of our Hosting packages and we have since have made it available to all WordPress users regardless of their host (with a few feature limitations).

According to a recently published Google study, hacked sites are up 180% over the past year. In an effort to help keep your websites and account from becoming another victim, we are excited to announce that we are rolling out our new security solution called Patchman. Patchman is a multi-function security tool that provide the following 3 services free of charge! We are rolling out Patchman on all Shared SSD Hosting accounts and on HDD servers numbered 81+. As Patchman requires cPanel, we are also investigating ways to offer this service on our Reseller, VPS and Dedicated Servers as well.

If you are a Magento user, you’re probably well aware of the fact there is a beta version of Magento 2 currently available. Since this is a beta version, you won’t want to upgrade your production site quite yet. However since this beta version will eventually lead to a stable version, now is as good of a time as any to start planning your upgrade. That way you can get the fastest and most secure version when Magento 2 becomes available.

In previous blog posts, including our comparison of HHVM vs PHPNG, we talk about how PHP 7 typically beats HHVM by up to 20% and it is up to 100% faster than PHP 5.6 (even though we do need to run our own performance comparisons here at A2 Hosting). These numbers are definitely provide a nice broad overview of the dramatic performance boost and memory efficiency enhancements offered by PHP 7.

If you are not a developer, you probably aren’t familiar with HHVM and PHPNG. If you’re hosting your site with A2 Hosting though, it’s more than likely your site is powered by PHP. The beta version of PHP 7 was just released on Friday so it doesn’t hurt to learn how this new version of PHP can dramatically increase the performance of your site. First we need to step back about 7 years and look at another project called HHVM to get a better idea of the direction of PHP 7 and why PHP developers focused on certain features in this version.

As you may have read on our June 29th blog post, the alpha version of PHP 7 was released. Since that post was published, PHP released the first beta version of PHP. We know that PHP 7 has a clear cut focus on performance. Let’s look at some of the contributing elements to those performance improvements and the other enhancements included with PHP 7.

With the recent Alpha release of PHP 7, A2 Hosting is proud to be one of the first providers to offer PHP 7 Hosting. PHP 7 is available on A2 Hosting’s Turbo Web Hosting service. Our PHP Switcher makes it easy to move between multiple PHP versions including PHP 5.1-5.6, and of course PHP 7.