Our annual Black Friday sale is here!
Save up to $480 on your first year of hosting!
Order our Startup, Plus, Turbo or Max hosting plans on an annual billing term and get 67% off your first year!
Effective August 15, 2024, pricing for new .COM domain name registrations and transfers will change to reflect an increase in price of all .COM domain names as announced by Verisign and ICANN, the operators of the .COM TLD.
.COM domain names due for renewal within the next 30 days will renew at existing rates. No changes will be made to existing renewal invoices.
.COM domains due for renewal on or after September 15, 2024 will renew at the following rates:
Was $20.99CAD >> Now $22.99CAD/year
Was $15.99USD >> Now $16.99USD/year
Whois privacy protection remains free for all eligible domain names.
It’s been eight years since we last revised our hosting plans, and with the recent completion of our operating system and server hardware upgrades, we thought it would be a great time to shake things up a bit.
Introducing our new Startup, Plus, Turbo and Max hosting plans.
All plans include a massive 67% discount with the pre-paid purchase of a 12-month hosting plan, making our new line of hosting plans start at just $3.99*/month!
* Special prices are applicable for the first invoice. For all subsequent renewals regular prices apply.
In addition to these massive savings, all plans feature blazing fast SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, email service included, free SSL certificates, our new Sitejet website builder, optimized WordPress features and expert support at no additional cost!
Our new line of hosting plans can now be purchased at:
https://varialhosting.com/
When we launched our next-generation hosting platform back in 2016, we had deployed our servers on the CloudLinux 7 operating system (based on CentOS Linux) which had just gained compatibility with our cPanel hosting platform at the time. 8 years later, this operating system has now reached its end of life and has been discontinued.
Traditionally when a server operating system reaches its end of life, our only option was to setup a new server running a newer operating system and migrate customers to it, a time consuming but tried and true method we are very experienced with.
This year introduced a new option, the ELevate Project which could perform in place upgrades from CloudLinux 7 to CloudLinux 8 on existing servers.
While cPanel compatibility with CloudLinux 9 and a stable release of the ELevate Project had been promised for mid-2023, unfortunately these dates were not met as cPanel did not gain support for CloudLinux 9 until until March 2024 and the ELevate Project wasn’t considered stable until April. This created a lot of pressure for everyone in the hosting industry as both cPanel and CloudLinux repeated that they would not provide extended lifecycle support for CloudLinux 7, meaning running it past the June 30, 2024 end of life date would pose a major security risk.
As such, we finalized our migration plans in January and got to work. We knew we did not want to risk using the ELevate project as an issue with a failed upgrade could be catastrophic, resulting in lengthy downtime if a server wouldn’t boot and needed to be restored from backups. We also wanted to retire our oldest servers and upgrade the hardware components of others, so moving customers off of those servers was our best choice.
So the decision was made to migrate all customers to new servers. We had some CloudLinux 8 servers already deployed so we would start by migrating some customers to those servers while we waited for cPanel to introduce compatibility with CloudLinux 9 so we could skip to the newest operating system for the bulk of our migrations.
As CloudLinux 9 dropped support for a number of legacy applications such as PHP versions older than 5.6, we identified customers still requiring these versions and migrated them to our existing CloudLinux 8 servers first to keep their websites operational.
With cPanel growing closer to providing compatibility with CloudLinux 9 we deployed and configured many new servers and waited to begin the bulk of our migrations as soon as that compatibility was deemed stable.
In the past when performing server migrations we would schedule them for a weekend and we’d work around the clock for two or three days straight migrating all accounts from the server at once. With the growing size of our company and a need for a better work-life balance, we knew this wouldn’t be a feasible option this time.
Instead we reviewed each and every account, making note of those that could have potential challenges, such as requiring manual DNS updates, and scheduled anywhere from 10 to 50+ accounts for migration per day, every single day, from March until mid-June until all customer migrations had been completed.
While so significantly time consuming, this has been our most successful migration to date with a record low number of support tickets raised.
With an extensive 6 months of work and planning behind us, we can now breathe a sigh of relief to have completed our migrations before the deadline.
Other hosts weren’t so lucky. The delays with ELevate’s stability and cPanel’s CloudLinux 9 compatibility left many other providers without sufficient time to upgrade their server fleets. As such, at the end of May, cPanel and CloudLinux reversed course and announced a paid, extended lifecycle support program for CloudLinux 7 for an additional 18 months to prevent the security nightmare of having so many out of date servers on the Internet. While we wouldn’t need it, we were among those very vocal that such a program was critical given the time constraints introduced.
If you’ve read this far you may be asking, what does all of this mean for you?
1. Faster servers. Our oldest equipment has been retired and replaced with brand new, faster servers.
2. 100% solid state storage. All hard disk drives have been decommissioned and replaced with solid state drives. We spent tens of thousands on SSDs over the past few months to complete this upgrade. With the faster storage we have also doubled Disk IO limits across all of our hosting plans.
3. Team management. You can now create multiple logins for a cPanel account (Manage Teams feature) with the ability to limit access.
4. Email compression. Emails in your inbox are now compressed, significantly reducing the storage space they require.
5. Faster backups and restores. With an all-new offsite backup server and JetBackup upgraded to v5 across all servers, backup times have dropped from 8-12 hours per server to just 1-2 hours!
And several more new features are coming soon! Welcome to the new, next-generation of Varial Hosting!
We have scheduled the migration of all customers off of our Snape server and will be shutting down the server on Sunday, June 30, 2024.
Customers using 3rd party DNS services to point their domains to our servers have been notified by email with instructions on how to point their domains to their new server IP. This action must be completed by Saturday, June 29, 2024 at the latest to prevent any service interruptions.
We have scheduled the migration of all customers off of our Malfoy server and will be shutting down the server on Friday, June 14, 2024.
Customers using 3rd party DNS services to point their domains to our servers have been notified by email with instructions on how to point their domains to their new server IP. This action must be completed by Thursday, June 13, 2024 at the latest to prevent any service interruptions.
We have scheduled the migration of all customers off of our Hermione server and will be shutting down the server on Tuesday, May 14, 2024.
Customers using 3rd party DNS services to point their domains to our servers have been notified by email with instructions on how to point their domains to their new server IP. This action must be completed by Monday, May 13, 2024 at the latest to prevent any service interruptions.
We will be completing the migration of all customers off of our Sirius server this week and will be shutting down the server on Sunday, April 14, 2024.
Customers using 3rd party DNS services to point their domains to our servers have been notified by email with instructions on how to point their domains to their new server IP. This action must be completed by Saturday, April 13, 2024 at the latest to prevent any service interruptions.
Over the next 3 months, all customers hosted on our Hermione, Malfoy, Sirius and Snape servers will be migrated to new servers.
Affected customers will receive an additional email with more information when their date of migration has been scheduled.
The operating system on these servers will reach its end of life later this year, requiring all customers hosted on these servers to be moved to new servers to accommodate our server upgrade plans.
In addition to the new operating system, customers will benefit from significantly faster SSD storage available on our new servers following the migration.
What can I do now to get ready?
If you use our email service and connect to your email using applications like Outlook or Apple Mail, please verify that you are connecting to mail.yourdomain.com (*replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name) as both your incoming and outgoing mail servers.
This will allow your email to seamlessly transition from the old server to the new server during the migration process. If you are currently connecting to addresses like servername.varialhosting.com, we recommend changing your incoming and outgoing mail server addresses to mail.yourdomain.com prior to your scheduled migration date. All other email settings can remain the same.
If you are using a 3rd party email service, no changes are required.
More information will be given in an additional email when the date of your migration is scheduled.
Customers with reseller hosting plans who are utilizing our custom DNS name server feature in order to use custom name server addresses like ns4.yourdomain.com instead of ns4.varialhosting.com please note that our NS4 name server IP has changed from 185.34.216.121 to 54.36.162.126.
If you are utilizing our custom DNS name server feature please immediately update your NS4 IP address at both the DNS and domain registrar level to: 54.36.162.126
This change must be made before March 6, 2024.
If you have questions or require assistance with this, please feel free to contact us and we can help you with these changes.