Hey all, Tyler here.

As mentioned back in April, we were intending to upgrade our hosting infrastructure sometime in the summer of 2022. Unfortunately, things have happened that require us to speed things up a bit. So instead of waiting until the middle of summer, we’ve opted to do it now. The new Royal1 server will be online before the end of this week, and we aim to decommission our old server before the end of the month.

So, why the change of pace? What happened? 

Long story short, our old Royal server is experiencing some problems that our server management team is unable to resolve within a timely manner. For this reason, we’ve decided it would ultimately be faster to just bring a whole new server online, and transfer everything over. If you’ve been following our server status page lately, you’ll be aware of our current AutoSSL situation. Quite frankly, our management team requires additional time to troubleshoot this issue, which is time that we don’t currently have.

So, the solution was to fast-track our infrastructure upgrades, which were originally planned to take place in the summer. As of right now, we have our new Royal1 server online, though we’re just working on setting everything up.

What does this mean for you?

Faster websites. As in, significantly faster. The processor is over 4.25x faster. There is 2.6x more RAM. We’re also transitioning to an SSD, which not only offers more storage than our current server (3TB versus the old 2TB), but is also 5x faster, too!

So yeah, it’s faster, which means your website will be faster as well.

What else is changing?

DoRoyal’s new Royal1 server, as well as all future cPanel servers that we provide, will have a few significant changes.

For starters, we are switching to MariaDB from MySQL. MariaDB is basically the open source fork of MySQL. But what does that mean for you? Well, better performance, better overall security, and a faster overall experience. All of your MySQL powered scripts and functions will continue to operate like normal, so you won’t need to make any kind of changes. Everything should just work straight out of the box.

Beyond that, we are also going to be introducing support for PHP 8, which has been a long requested feature. PHP 8 should be available by the end of the week, or early next week at the latest.

Okay, so what’s next?

On your side, as a client, there’s really nothing for you to do. Not yet at least. We’re going to try and make this transition as seamless as possible, with as little downtime as possible, too. Ideally, there won’t be any downtime at all, and you will be able to simply keep using your website as you are today, without any issues, errors, or faults.

However, we’ll let everybody know if something should happen, or if these plans of a seamless transition should change. We will send an email to everybody hosting on our Royal server in a couple of days.

 

I’ve got questions. HELP ME!

Sure, we know quite a few of you are likely to have some questions, especially since this change is rather late notice. Feel free to reach out using the usual support methods, and we’ll get back to you when we can.