PHP 7 support and portable public IP addresses now available on Layershift Jelastic PaaS
We’ve just added 2 more great features to our Jelastic PaaS to help you to deploy and run your sites with maximum performance and efficiency.
PHP 7: Max performance, minimum cost
Hot on the heels of introducing PHP 7 to our Cloud VPS hosting plans, we’re happy to follow it up by announcing the immediate availability of PHP 7 on the Layershift Jelastic PaaS as well.
Until now, our Jelastic PaaS was a great place to check your code for PHP 7 compatibility, via the Docker(R) based container images – available since the PHP 7 project launched its release candidates, but from today PHP 7 has graduated to a first class citizen of our Jelastic PaaS.
Why is PHP 7 so exciting? Besides an assortment of new language features to take your productivity to the next level, PHP 7 offers substantial performance increases whilst also using less memory.
Thanks to our unique auto-vertical scaling – where you only pay for resource consumption, not instance size – this means using PHP 7 saves money. I’ll say that again, very slowly:
Meet the new Plesk 12.5
A new major version of Plesk has been released and we were one of the first hosting providers offering it to our clients. It’s Plesk 12.5 we’re talking about and this release marks major improvements to PHP support amongst other important updates.
All of our new Cloud VPS hosting plans come with Plesk 12.5 and we are excited to bring you this more amazing improvements as they appear.
Using New Relic on our Jelastic PaaS made easy
In the wake of Black Friday / Cyber Monday, you’re probably not alone if you’re scratching your head wondering how to make sure your January Sale runs a little smoother!
New Relic is one of the most popular tools to monitor application performance and identify troublesome code bottlenecks. Such deep insights are invaluable because they enable you to focus your effort on the parts that need you most.
The immense flexibility of our Jelastic PaaS means it was always easy to install New Relic on a Java based environment, but now we are pleased to offer an easy solution for PHP environments too!
All Layershift Jelastic PaaS customers can now install New Relic on their PHP environments with just a few clicks.
New Relic – A watchdog you want to keep safe
There are many application monitoring services that will keep vigil and inform you if something goes wrong, but unlike most New Relic is not focused on your uptime. It focuses on performance.
Almost uniquely, this tool enables you to drill down through your code, so you know which specific function calls or SQL queries were executing slowly – not just that the overall response to the end user was slower.
Of course this is combined with a lovely sprinkling of RUM (real user monitoring) features and general performance tracking alerts to round out the solution.
Overall we think this makes New Relic a really useful companion for any production server, as it allows you to keep a close eye over your app performance AND know what steps to take if performance starts to degrade. This is crucial when it comes to maintaining user experience during those seasonal traffic peaks.
PHP 7 hosting now on our Cloud VPS range
It’s been less than a week since the official release date, but we are proud to say that we fully support early adopters who would like to deploy their application using the latest version of PHP.
Why switch to PHP 7 hosting?
The improvement in performance compared to previous PHP versions is almost unbelievable, reportedly between 25% to 70% increase on major PHP based applications. Not only that, but memory consumption was also reduced significantly, so putting it simply, you can do more with less.
There are a bunch of new features as well, some of which we have been waiting for for a long time:
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Scalar type declarations – probably the most controversial of all new features, however by using this marble of code, you will be able to set clear expectations for return values of functions and find possible code errors faster. Together with this feature, they also introduced support for new scalar types: integer, boolean, string and floating-point numbers.
PHP 5.6 available on our Cloud VPS platform
Over a year after PHP 5.5 was released, the latest and greatest version 5.6 has just arrived and is already supported on our fully managed Cloud VPS hosting platform.
New features in our PHP 5.6 hosting
Here are some of the highlights of this new version of PHP:
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Constant scalar expressions: you can now provide static scalar expressions, so you can now use static expressions (in the past you could only use static values), e.g. in function arguments, const declarations or property declarations;
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Memory usage using POST has been reduced;
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An interactive debugger called phpdbg has been implemented – you can access it from the command line to debug your code step-by-step;
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Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted (but check you have enough server resources before doing this!);
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php://input is now reusable;
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Many SSL/TLS improvements such as protection against attacks, improved peer verification, fingerprinting SSL certificates, and significant enhancements when using encrypted streams;