At Calico we strive to bring you useful features to enhance your hosting with us. This time round, we bring you two new options to our Supercali Linux hosting.

PHP7

As standard, our Linux hosting is set up to use PHP 5.6 (for legacy compatibility), but we can selectively set any account to use PHP 7. PHP 7 brings potential speed advantages, with some tests on WordPress sites showing it delivering the site content at twice the speed compared to version 5.6.

Not all sites and software modules on the sites will be PHP 7 compatible, but core WordPress is. If you want to set your site to PHP 7, please contact our helpdesk.

SSL Certificates and https

When anyone browses to your site using an http request, all the information between that person and your site travels unencrypted through every step of the Internet. So if they are on a public network or wifi connection, someone could be eavesdropping on them.

For normal browsing this wouldn’t be particularly interesting, but if the person is logging into your site using a password, or filling in a form, or maybe just clicking on sensitive links, they could be being watched. However if your site has an SSL certificate and allows https connections, the link from the person’s PC or device through to your site would become secure and encrypted and immune to eavesdropping. The SSL certificate also gives the person a level of confidence that they are on the correct site and not on a site pretending to be yours because the browser will give a warning if the SSL certificate doesn’t match up with your domain name.

WordPress has announced that it will be adding features in 2017 that will *require* SSL and https to be available, and Google takes https availability into account when ranking sites. We can now add a SSL certificate to your site for £10 + VAT pa, a reduction from our previous price of £30 + VAT pa. If you would like to give your customers this level of security, please contact us.