We are excited to announce our latest milestone; the inclusion of Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS to our Hosting Stack. Codenamed Focal Fossa – this release is a cat – it sits proudly in the category of Enterprise Linux Distributions for its security, maintainability, flexibility, and forward-thinking. We have our own internal code-names as well and we call this iteration of our VPS “Gen 3” as it is the 3rd generational jump we’ve made since we started offering Managed WordPress VPS Hosting on AWS about a decade ago.
While an updated server OS is not quite as interesting as some of our other recent additions, like being able to choose your PHP version, cache key management, redirect management, detailed disk usage reporting or even really good CI/CD integration, it is nonetheless a vital element of the overall platform and must be maintained. If you’ve ever managed your own servers, you’ll know how important it is to stay current on your OS – and that replacing existing systems can have lots of unexpected twists and turns. This can be one of the most daunting aspects of running your own server infrastructure. For Pagely, it’s business as usual; it’s just another one of the things you don’t need to worry about when using our managed service. We’ve put the hours in to research the upgrade and make sure all of our features will work with it, as well as making the upgrade process itself as safe and seamless as can be.
What’s new in Focal Fossa? A lot of stuff. But not much of it directly translates to a change to your Pagely experience. There are newer versions of packages for everything across the board; a newer Linux Kernel (5.4); toolchains like Python (3.8.2), Ruby (2.7.0), and Perl (5.30); as well as things like OpenSSH (8.2). While these updates do not introduce a fundamental change to how you use our service, we know many Security and Developer types will appreciate the upgrade. Security scans always return better results on newer versions of software rather than older versions, even if they have the same fixes back-ported to them. For Developers, having the same versions of tools on the system just makes life easier if you also develop on Ubuntu. Naturally, the LTS (Long Term Support) release is the most stable and it remains in active support for 5 years.
As of April 26, 2021, we’ve been activating all new Pagely VPS customers with this new build. If you’re ready to try it out, head over to our signup page!
It goes without saying that all of our customers will get the upgrade as well. As we did with the previous jump from Gen 1 to Gen 2, we take care of all the heavy lifting. We’ll reach out to customers soon when we’re ready to schedule your upgrade!