Apache 2

[leafo]

I remember reading about planned upgrade to apache 2 in june. According to cpanel, my server (mercury) is running apache 1.3.3.7 though. Can we expect to see apache upgrade in the near future.

Also, the email mentioning apache talked about ruby. Do you think it would also be possible to get mod_python. Django and TurboGears are two python web frameworks that are quite popular.

[Tony]

Well our plans of upgrading to Apache 2 relied on cPanel sticking to their release schedule of cPanel 11. They were unfortunately quite a few months behind on just releasing it as stable (did this on August 15th). The new Apache building tools which include Apache 2.2 are not slated to hit Stable until September 26th.

All our servers run on RELEASE which is pretty much stable so we may see Apache 2 a bit earlier than that (we'll be testing upgrades before we even try it). You can find more information about cPanel's release schedule by visiting http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/cpanel11/index.html .

Doing this sort of web server setup without doing it through cPanel is obviously ill advised so we're not going to be attempting that. Even when other hosts start to try to use it once it gets past Alpha and hits more of a beta release we're not going to be attempting the install. There is probably going to be numerous issues with the Apache 2 upgrade so we're just going to watch other hosts run into all the issues. This is exactly what we did with cPanel 11 and our transition was much better than others who migrated early. Apache 2 itself does not introduce anything special to the end user, what it does provide however is better performance (less resources being used).

As for extra modules we'll of course be evaluating modules and possibly installing them. But one step at a time we'll deploy Apache 2 first with that Ruby will hopefully be supported. After that we'll look to doing Python. Of course at this time all our machines run Python it's simply not an Apache module.

So what we've been doing while idle with cPanel 11 and Apache 2 is doing internal upgrades to our servers as well as our we handle things. For example the Mercury server you're on was upgraded to a quad core system with 4x250GB SATA II raid-10. As it stands we are now also much better prepared to quickly migrate users to other servers with no down time. This is huge for us in the future if we ever deploy multi server setups. We've also been working on better documentation when it comes to sales, billing and support and we hope to have that up on our site some time in September.