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Upcoming Server Migration and Upgrade Notice

March 13, 2024

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.

Resellers: NS4 name server IP change

February 20, 2024

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.

PHP 8.3 Now Available

February 16, 2024

PHP 8.3 is now available to all Varial Hosting customers.

PHP 8 builds upon the great improvements brought forward in PHP 7 and introduces several new features for developers which you can read about at: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration83.php

To change your PHP version, simply log into your cPanel and follow this guide: https://varialhosting.com/support/faq/hosting/#changephp

Please be aware that not all web applications and PHP extensions are compatible with PHP 8.3 at this time. For best compatibility we recommend using PHP 8.2 until development of PHP 8.3 matures.

Discontinuation of RVSiteBuilder

February 1, 2024

With the recent launch of our new Sitejet DIY Website Builder, we are discontinuing RVSiteBuilder and will gradually remove it from our servers.

For customers with active websites built with RVSiteBuilder, your websites will be migrated to a central server where we will keep RVSiteBuilder installed for you to continue to use. RVSiteBuilder will then be removed from all other servers and will no longer be available for new customers to use.

Customers with active RVSiteBuilder websites will be contacted if their accounts need to be migrated to a new server.

We encourage the use of our new Sitejet Builder for customers looking for a beginner friendly way to create a website.

Introducing Sitejet DIY Website Builder

January 30, 2024

Create beautiful, modern websites without knowing HTML!

We are pleased to announce that Sitejet Builder is now available to all Varial Hosting customers.

Sitejet Builder features over 140 professionally designed templates and a powerful drag and drop visual editor allowing anyone to build an attractive website with no coding required.

Advanced features include AI-driven text generation, free stock photos and videos, responsive website templates, eCommerce functionality and SEO-optimized content suggestions.

If you are looking for a beginner friendly way to create a website, give Sitejet Builder a try!

How do I access Sitejet Builder?
Why does it say I cannot create a Sitejet website?

2023 Year in Review

January 3, 2024

Happy New Year!

In 2023 we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our company. Thank you for being part of our family and selecting Varial Hosting as your independent hosting provider.

We received an unprecedented number of acquisition offers from major players in the industry this year. While we appreciate their interest, we’ve declined to have these conversations as we are committed to providing alternative, independent hosting services for an Internet that is becoming increasingly centralized and owned by just a handful of corporations.

Perhaps they heard that our 24/7 support ticket response time average for 2023 was just 18 minutes and want to know how we do it?

Don’t worry, we love what we do and have no intentions on selling our business.

In addition to being quick to the keys, last year we introduced a new cPanel design, significantly upgraded our my.varialhosting.com client portal, launched PHP 8.2 support, completed our migration from MySQL to MariaDB, and continued transferring domains to our new domain registration partner, allowing us to offer Whois Privacy for free, which has already saved our customers tens of thousands of dollars to date.

And we have big plans for 2024!

In the coming weeks my wife, Cara Warnar, will be returning from maternity leave to work with us again as Sales & Marketing Manager after the birth of our second child/future employee.

Together we’ll launch PHP 8.3 support across all servers and unveil an exciting, new website builder that can help our customers build stylish, modern websites without needing to know HTML or deal with the complexities of WordPress.

We’ll continue working on the development of a new, robust knowledge base for our website, as we’re well aware that our support materials have become outdated and need a refresh.

Customers on a number of servers will also be migrated to new servers before the end of summer as we upgrade underlying operating systems and phase out our remaining hard drive based storage servers for solid state storage.

It’s sure to be a busy year and we’d like to thank you all for joining us on this ride!

Your business and support is much appreciated. Wishing you all the best in the new year!

Sincerely,

Ryan Smith, CEO
Varial Hosting

Black Friday Sale: 50% off WordPress Hosting

November 24, 2023

Our annual Black Friday sale is here!

Save 50% on your first year of WordPress hosting when ordering our Small Hosting plan using the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY at varialhosting.com/wordpress.

This offer is available through to Cyber Monday and is valid for new orders of our Small Hosting plan on annual billing cycles only.

Click here to get 50% off your first year of WordPress hosting!

Scheduled Network Maintenance [Completed]

November 21, 2023

Data center technicians will be performing network maintenance on Thursday, November 23, 2023 from 8PM-9PM CST.

The network connection that is provided to our equipment will simply be moved to a different port on our upstream provider’s equipment during this maintenance.

Estimated downtime for all services is expected to be within 30 seconds to 5 minutes while our network connection is moved from one port to another.

Scheduled Maintenance: MySQL (MariaDB) Upgrades on Malfoy and Sirius [Completed]

September 19, 2023

In the evening of Saturday, October 7, 2023 we will be upgrading the MySQL database server on our Malfoy and Sirius servers from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.5.

MariaDB is an optimized, drop-in replacement for MySQL.

This upgrade will be completed in two steps, first the migration from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.3, and then the upgrade from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.5.

Websites utilizing MySQL databases will be temporarily unavailable for approximately 15-30 minutes until the upgrades are completed on each server.

Upon the completion of this maintenance, all of our servers will now be migrated to MariaDB.

Change in .COM domain name pricing

September 1, 2023

Effective September 1, 2023, 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 expiring within the next 30 days will renew at existing rates. No changes will be made to existing renewal invoices.

.COM domains expiring after October 1, 2023 will renew at the following rates:

Was $18.99CAD >> Now $20.99CAD/year
Was $13.99USD >> Now $15.99USD/year