Recent PHP 5.3 Upgrade - Moving Hosting

[wrogo]

I have had a number of Rochen accounts for a while now, some in my name and some in company names, and have been happy enough with the service. I initially moved my own and a number of customer sites to Rochen based on positive recommendations on the JReviews forum and also Rochen's good reputation.

There has been some site / server outages but then sometimes things are just beyond your control. It is not a perfect world we live in and even some of our co-located servers in Tier-2 DCs have been down due to network or power issues.

But then came the recent PHP 5.3 upgrade. Now I understand why it was done and agree that there might be a compelling explanation why 5.2 is suddenly unsecure and that a forced migration is required. I concede that there has been ample notice of the impending upgrade. I have heeded this notice and where possible have tried to anticipate any issue this may cause. But of course as anyone who has spend some time in IT will agree, you just cannot prepare for every eventuality.

That said, for some of my sites this has been a disaster. We have had to spend loads of time fixing sites and some we were not able to get working again. Where things really started to go sour for me was when I opened a support case. I acknowledged that the PHP 5.3 upgrade has broken sites and wanted to see if there were any documented known fixes or workarounds with respect to Akeeba Backup and Restore no longer working. In my opinion it was logical that Rochen Support might be able to steer me in the right direction in case this was a common issue experienced by other customers with the recent PHP upgrade.

Instead I got a stock reply that Rochen does not support 3rd party scripts. Basically saying "fix it on your own". This really made my blood boil and I posted a rather sarcastic reply to the effect "thanks for nothing". After that the suport engineer pointed out to me that I was running an outdated script on the site and question and that I had to update it as I was in violation of AUP. I did point out that I wll fix it when I can access the site again. I then had to ask several time what the script was. The engineer would not answer and eventually Martin Rouf replied saying that it appears I am saying Rochen should not have upgraded PHP, which was not the case at all. He did point out that the out of date script was indeed the Joomla script and also repeated that Rochen does not support 3rd party scripts.

In all I felt that responses from Rochen were aggressive and arrogant. Case of "we break it, but we had to you see, so now you fix what we have done without our help".

If we did something like this to any of our customers they would not stand for it at all - that is a fact. Now there are a fair number of issues coming out of this upgrade but I for one have had enough. I have despite a Rochen Vault restore been unable to restore this site and Akeeba still does not work.

Jreviews coder Alejandro says this on the subject of why JReviews did not work after the upgrade -"I noticed from another client's site that this line was no longer working:

zend_extension="/usr/local/IonCube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.3_new.so"

So I uploaded the new loaders myself, which I got from the ionCube website and changed the path above to point to the loader inside the Joomla folder. If you need help with this submit a ticket with access to the admin side and ftp.

This is 100% Rochen's responsibility. If they upgrade php, they must also upgrade the ionCube loaders that many of their clients are using. They have the wrong/outdated version of the loaders pre-installed on the server."

Jreviews and Akeeba are not the only scripts left broken, I know there are some core Joomla issue in addition to those with other scripts.

I have recommended Rochen to many, many of my customers, not just shared hosting but VMS and dedicated as well, but can no longer do so as I have lost faith in Rochen. I in fact have a customer who has just won a very large opportunity to provide a facilities management service and was all set to send them to Rochen. They would need at least two decent dedicated servers so I now need to find an alternative.

I am not the only Rochen customer who has moved on or will be doing so. The fact is Rochen's approach and handling of this upgrade has had a very severe impact on many sites. It is just that many others are not wasting time posting or complaining - they are just quietly moving on, taking their business somewhere else. As for myself I have found a good alternative host somwhere else and will work with my customers to start planning migration of all sites to the new host.

Now you may read this and disagree but the test of a good host comes when you need their help most. But in my opinion, and for my sites, Rochen is not a safe or reliable host. It is easy to compliment a hosting or other provide when all is running smoothly but during this crisis I have seen another side of Rochen and I did not like what I saw.

 

[Chris]

Thank you for your post.

I am sorry to hear you have run into issues with the recent upgrade from PHP 5.2 to 5.3. While issues are not widespread we have heard of other clients running into similar problems as you.

While the upgrade went fairly smoothly over all I agree that we perhaps could have handled certain things differently. The situation in regards to ionCube is a little more complicated than it appears on the face of it and we are actively preparing a full statement on that and hope to have it released within the next few days.

If you have not already reviewed it I would advise taking a look at our Knowledge Base article outlining common issues and solutions following the PHP 5.3 upgrade: https://my.rochen.com/index.php?fuse=knowledgebase&view=KB_viewArticle&articleId=154&public=1

Ideally we would have preferred not to have upgraded to PHP 5.3 right now but unfortunately PHP 5.2 has been made “End of Life” by the PHP Group and is no longer receiving any security updates. Some hosts will continue running PHP 5.2 but we felt this wasn’t a safe path to take and could potentially end up putting our clients at great risk. Our view was that scheduling an upgrade to PHP 5.3 with enough notice and then doing the upgrade in a controlled way was the best course of action. We have also had many users actually requesting PHP 5.3.

As I noted above, the upgrade to PHP 5.3 has overall gone fairly well but it certainly hasn’t gone as smoothly as we hoped it would have done and I think there are certainly lessons for us to learn here. We will have a full statement out within the next few days that will in particular address the situation with ionCube.

I would ask you to wait until we have the statement out in the next few days and in the meantime review the above Knowledge Base article before taking any other steps. If you do leave Rochen though then that is of course your right and we will respect that completely. I would be happy to schedule a follow-up telephone call with you if you would like.

Thank you for your business.

 

[Flashcube]

Im in the same boat. I just signed up with Rochen. As much as I love the speed I don't like the fact that a few of the extensions are broken by this change. I don't think too many people have put two and two together. But as I scour forums to fix my problem the more I realize they lead back to Rochen and the time frame of the PHP upgrade. Hopefully I can find a solution and find compatible extensions.

 

[alexwalker]

Rebuilt site

I spent two days having to rebuild a site which I specially brought over to Rochen because I believed it would be more resilient. The upgrade to php 5.3 made my site fall over, which may have been due in part to plugins I had installed on the site. If only there was a way of testing prior to the move that would have been better.

 

[wrogo]

Chris, thank you for taking the time to reply. We have already moved some sites in order to get them up quickly. Our new host for these sites are giving us the option to run either PHP 5.2 or 5.3 which means we can now do a planned migration to 5.3.

I have also read the Knowledge Base article outlining common issues. This was in fact the first thing I did.

If any good has come out of this it will be that the Joomla community will see that Joomla extensions get updated to ensure 5.3 compatibility, and this should make migrating to 5.3 easier for our own and also other affected sites.

 

[gonzoyid]

I have only been using Joomla for 2 months and am still very much a novice. I chose Rochen after a lot of research and am happy with my choice. I do agree with wrogo regarding the ioncube issue and that was my first thought,why don`t they just upgrade it. They obviously have their reasons and I look forward to the statement that Chris mentioned. I was lucky that I only had one small issue with a live site and managed to solve it. However I then experienced quite a few issues with a site I was starting to build with Joomla 1.5.23. Based on this I then restarted the site with Joomla 1.6.3 and have since built 3 sites on that platform with no issues. I don't think Rochen could have won either way,there were bound to be some issues and everyone has learnt from the experience. I am more than happy with the service Rochen provide,my sites are fast as is their response time to tickets,I will continue to use them for a long time to come.