The spam situation hurts baddddddlllllllly.

My thoughts on 5.2 breaking things:
Every new version of every programming language breaks something for someone. But admin (in this case Dreamhost) is not to be blamed for it. It’s developers responsibility to stay on top of the things and fix his apllications to work with the latest version of chosen language.
We have this policy where I work and it works flawlessly. Before upgrading we put out a notice that system will be updated so developers are alert and ready to fix any errors that might pop up.
Of course it is completely different for mission critical applications, but those are on seperate servers.
I know your customers are not all developers and many of them just use one-click installs so you are naturally “afraid” of their reaction if some of those break.
I guess the right way to do it would be to test all your one-click installs on php 5.2 and if needed upgrade them and only then go on with upgrading to php 5.2.
Idealy you need not worry for any other applications/websites as those that are installed by users should be updated and supported by them (us). Your only responsibility in that regard as a web host is to take care that every programming language is patched and up to date.

I know, we are living in a real world with so many other factors interfering and not in an ideal world but just to share my thoughts…

Best regards,

Dodig

[drumroll]

* Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

Please, upgrade our one-clicks, happy office :)

I hope we will soon have the upgrade for RMagick too! :)

For every person who wants us to upgrade, there’s probably another 10 who would be mad if we upgrade and break their website. We’re always in the middle getting blamed from both sides!

@ postgresql people: We’ve put a considerable amount of work into our existing MySQL system. We’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way and we’re still learning new things all the time. It’s not a small task to support a large-scale installation of a database server. We are always interested in investing time and energy into supporting the technology that will help you run your websites and we will continue to adopt new technologies as it makes sense. I can tell you that Postgres support has definitely come up in discussion more than once and it’s not totally out of the question for some point in the future (probably not near).

:)

Here is the short summary of improvements and fixes in PHP5.2:
http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_0.php
and this is the complete changelog:
http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.2.0

Few things that are great about 5.2:
- new memory manager (aka faster servers)
- added data stream support (finally developers are able to give some feedback to the user on uploads in form of a progress bar)
- ability to use Zend Framework (now we must compile our own php for this)

I really recommend reading this for more on why PHP5.2 is so important: http://ilia.ws/files/phpworks_php52.pdf

1. A viable rails mongrel option.
2. A datacenter in Japan (let me know if you want any help with that).
. . .

I guess that’s it, at least for now as far as major concerns are concerned.