Our servers have been upgraded to cPanel version 64. Within this upgrade there are several new functions available (read about them in this article). Another new function available is iOS push notifications for email on devices from Apple. This has been tested and can be found on all our cPanel servers at PRO ISP.

This technology will improve the battery time for your iOS device and receive email quicker.

To start using push notifications you need to exit and close the email application or do a restart of the device. Follow this guide to see how to exit and close the application on your iPhone, iPad or iPod. Afterwards push for email against our servers will work immediately and the unit will vibrate when a new email is received.

This technology is only available if email is set up using IMAP. If you are using POP3 this will not work. This is also only available for Apple’s email application.

Receive notifications

New emails will not automatically show on the screen when the unit is locked. You can adjust the settings to receive warnings when specific people send you email. Follow these steps:

1. Open Mail application.
2. Choose “Mailboxes” on the top left corner.
3. Choose “I” symbol to the right of the VIP menu.
4. In the VIP list choose “Add VIP”.
5. Choose which of your contacts to be shown on the locked screen when you receive email from them.

During the next few weeks cPanel will be updated to cPanel version 64 on all of our servers. These updates are done a few times each year after they are tested and available. Since updates contains several different things we have written about the most important ones for our customers.

Fast Email Searching (IMAP Full Text Search)

This technology (Solr) will be activated on all our servers and will work for everyone using email with IMAP at PRO ISP. The technology works on all iOS units, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and all the webmail clients we have available.

How does it work?
When searching for an email with text or other the server will index the entire email account. The first time the search will be somewhat slow, but all future searches will be much faster compared to before as the account was indexed earlier.

This technology will require more resources from the server (CPU and disk space). This will not affect the disk space for our clients, but directly on the server.

Tidy Mailboxes

A new icon will be available in the control panel to give an overview of the number of emails and disk space for the different email accounts. It will also be possible to tidy up the email accounts using these options:
– Remove all emails older than 1 year in a folder
– Remove all emails in a folder over 30MB
– Remove all emails in a folder

Look for the icon “Email Disk Usage” under the category “Email”.

Optimizing

Improvements will be made on a server level for the email servers as well. Mainly sending/receiving email will be faster as well as reducing the battery usage of iOS units.

New styles (white/black)

Several of our customers have changed to Paper Lantern theme in the control panel. Now white and black is available for anyone wanting to use this.

Software

The most important and highly requested updated this time is phpMyAdmin which will be updated from version 4.0.10 to 4.6.6. The current version (4.0.10) was released in 2013 and the new in 2017. In the future new versions will be released more often.

SSL proxy subdomains

It will now be possible to use your own SSL on proxy subdomains (for example webmail.yourdomain.net/cpanel.yourdomain.net). If you have a wildcard SSL certificate you can install this on the subdomains in cPanel.

DMARC

Within the zone editor it is now possible to add DMARC records within the interface instead of manually.

Wildcard certificate

If you have web hosting with PRO ISP it is not only the website you should consider making secure when it comes to SSL. You are most likely using email and other services you are not aware of should use SSL. This is especially important if there are many users of these services. Wildcard SSL certificates will the best choice in this case. The following addresses are useful to secure with SSL on our web hosting (in addition to the website itself):

• webmail.exampledomain.org
  You can connect to http://webmail.exampledomain.org without any problem unsecured, but we recommend you always use https instead with the alternate address you have been given (which is a bit more difficult to remember). The benefit of SSL on webmail.exampledomain.org is that you can use this address with https and it is easier to remember for all the email users on the domain.
• mail.exampledomain.org
  This address is used typically in email clients as host name when setting up email addresses. If you do not have a certificate on this address users will receive a warning regarding the SSL certificate not being the same as the address. The warning will not appear if you have installed a valid SSL certificate and you will avoid any confusion for the email users. Be however aware you may just as well use exampledomain.org as host name in the email client. The reason why many still use mail.exampledomain.org is probably because the address traditionally has been used for this.
• cpanel.exampledomain.org
  This is the address you can log into cPanel with. If you do not have a certificate on this address we recommend you always use https instead for the alternative address you have been given. The benefit of SSL on cpanel.exampledomain.org is that you can use the address with https and it is easy to remember.
• ftp.exampledomain.org
  Many people use this address for FTP (up-/downloading of files) service. Several FTP clients are now using SSL/TLS automatically and these will show a warning for the error on the certificate unless you are using your own certificate.For many of the addresses above it is not possible to install a certificate for each address. There is however a type of SSL certificate that covers most of the addresses above and that cPanel sets up to secure all the addresses with: Wildcard SSL certificate.This certificate will secure all sub domains of the domain the certificate is issued for and will in the example above be *.exampledomain.org. You will in other words be able to use it for all the addresses above, as well as other sub domains you create, for example webshop.exampledomain.org.

When should you consider using Wildcard SSL certificate?

We would recommend this in two cases:

• If you have several sub domains you wish to secure, as it will be easier to operate fewer certificates, and cheaper then several certificates.
• If you have several users for webmail, email clients, cPanel or FTP as you will not have confusing errors and you can use easier addresses to reach the services.
  Be aware there are not any Wildcard certificates for EV certificates.

Multi-domain SSL certificate

As the name indicates, multi-domain certificates can secure several addresses. Typically, it will secure a total of 3 or more addresses with the option to purchase more. The benefit of this certificate versus the wildcard certificate is that you can purchase several domains and sub domains on the same certificate. For example, you can secure the following in one certificate:

• exampledomain.org
• abc.proisp.no
• proisp.eu

You can normally secure up to 100 different wildcard addresses in one certificate (even more in some cases).

When should you consider using multi-domain SSL certificate?

We would recommend this in the following cases:

The same recommendations for wildcard if there are a few sub domains to be secured.
cPanel prevents the installation of more than one certificate on domains and sub domains pointing to the same folder on the webserver. Typically, our clients have this problem when using alias domains where they would use mycompanyname.no, mycompanyname.com, mycompanyname.se all pointing to the same holder. You will then need to use a multi-domain certificate to secure these domains – if not it is only possible to secure one of them.

When you want to secure several (sub)domains with an EV certificate:
If you are in full control and have a clear overview of your domains this certificate would be practical. In many cases we however see there are issues with issuing, reissuing and renewal if you have many domains on one certificate. The reason could be errors in the information registered on one domain, a configuration that has been altered or other issues that causes delays.

Due to this we recommend you avoid use of a multi-domain certificate unless you:

• Have full control and a good overview of the domains.
• Do not have any problems with several addresses pointing to the same folder on the web server.
• You don’t have many sub-domains
• There are wildcard multi-domain SSL certificates as well!

Your visitors or customers may not always experience superb net connection and it may take time to load a certain page of your website. However, most of the time, the root cause of the problem is your super slow website. It is important to speed up your website if you don’t want to lose your customers or visitors.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

According to research, 40% of people don’t hesitate to ditch the sites that need more than 3 seconds to load. It is important to test the speed of your website using Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, DareBoost, and/or other website speed test tools. You need to give more importance to the speed result than the website score that the speed test tool has given.

Using Pingdom

Pingdom is probably the most favorite website speed test tool around. It is simple to use. All you need to do is enter your website URL in the provided space and hit the “Test Now” button. It will give you a summary of your web page performance that includes:

• The performance grade of your website.
• The number of requests.
• The load time of your website.
• The page size.

Pingdom also offers additional information, which can be found below the summary, that you can use to speed up your site.

Using Google PageSpeed Insights

The Google PageSpeed Insights can measure the speed of the desktop and mobile versions of your website. The range of score is between 0 and 100. A score of 85 or more only implies that your web page is performing well. You may choose to do something and speed up your website even more or wait until the next scheduled speed test. Take note that your website will not always yield favorable results. It is important to keep a regular speed test schedule to properly monitor the performance of your website.

The Different Ways to Speed Up Your Website

You need to provide the best experience to your customers and visitors when they come to your site. They won’t experience something great if your web pages take so much time to load. When the speed test did not give favorable results, there are things that you can do to speed up your site. You can try to look for a better hosting plan, make your images internet-friendly, eliminate website baggage, and/or cut down on external scripts. You can also optimize the CSS and JavaScript files. It is important to reduce HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests and use a content delivery network (CDN). Also, Google includes the site speed as one of the factors in determining the rank of a website.

Reduce External Scripts

The external scripts, such as the JavaScript code to add the extra feature to your site, create HTTP requests each time fresh page loads. The external scripts that may prevent to speed up your site are Facebook “like” boxes, external commenting systems, pop-up boxes, and website analytics services. This doesn’t mean you need to avoid them because they can somehow help your site. You can consult Pingdom once more and see which files consume too much time to load. You can either remove it or see how you can fix it.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Having too many HTTP requests won’t help speed up your website. Most sites often become slow due to HTTP requests that are too large or too many. Your web browser uses the HTTP each time it gets a file, such as a picture and a page, from the server. Your computer sends a request to retrieve a certain file. To reduce the HTTP request, you need to check the number of HTTP requests that your site makes (you can consult Pingdom). You need to eliminate the unnecessary images. You can also reduce the remaining images’ file size. Evaluate other areas that may be responsible for making your website go slow.

Use a Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A cloud CDN is basically the same as many optimized servers all over the world that supply web content to users per geographic location, but it is better than the optimized servers. The cloud CDN helps accelerate any website online and provide protection from attackers (see image below).

Your visitors can quickly get the web content from your site and you can be certain that the cloud CDN, like CloudFlare, will be able to block the attackers from inflicting harm to your website. If you are based in the U.S. and the person accessing your site is in Korea, the individual accessing your site will be able to retrieve the web content quickly. The user won’t wait for a long time to get the content because of the cloud CDN. To enjoy the immense benefits of a cloud CDN, it is practical to buy a cloud server (VPS). It provides more control, stability, and freedom than a dedicated server.

Optimize the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript Files

In order to optimize your CSS and JavaScript files, you can try gzipping and/or minification. Gzipping locates all repetitive strings and substitutes them with pointers. Minification removes all the comments, eliminates white space, deletes non-required semicolons, and reduces the lengths of hex code. You can use both methods to achieve best results. Take note that gzipping is accomplished at the server level. In Minification, you can use minifying tools such as W3 Total Cache, BWP Minify, and WillPeavy.

Discard the Website Baggage

You can make your website go faster if you will eliminate the so-called website baggage such as the excessive WordPress plugins (for WordPress users), massive media libraries, themes, and others. You need to remove the trackbacks that you no longer need as well as the spam comments. The WordPress users can use WP-Optimize to efficiently clean the database. The WordPress users should remove the older installations of WordPress to help speed up your website.

There are times when hiring a professional is the best option to speed up your website, especially if your business is booming. Your slow website may cause you to lose some of your clients – you certainly don’t want that to happen.