What's New✨

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of PHP 7.4 in SpinupWP! ????

When PHP 7.4 was released back on November 28th, we notified customers that it wouldn’t be available until the php-redis package was updated in the package archive we use. This package was updated, and after some internal testing, we’re happy to add PHP 7.4 to SpinupWP.

But First, Update WP-CLI

Before switching any sites over to using PHP 7.4, you should update WP-CLI to the latest version. Older versions of WP-CLI are not compatible with PHP 7.4. There should be a notice in your server settings that looks like this…

Clicking “Upgrade Instructions” should get you a message like this…

If it’s a different message, you probably have some older server upgrades to execute first before the WP-CLI upgrade can be executed. Run the upgrades until the upgrade message disappears from your server settings screen.

Careful, WordPress 5.3+ Required

Updating your site to use PHP 7.4 is as simple as selecting PHP 7.4 from a dropdown in the SpinupWP dashboard…

When you select PHP 7.4, you will get a warning that WordPress 5.3+ is required and that you should update your site to WordPress 5.3+ before switching to PHP 7.4…

If you choose to continue and then save settings, PHP 7.4 will be installed on your server alongside the previous versions of PHP.

Reverting back to the older version of PHP is also as simple as selecting it from the dropdown and saving. As always, we recommend you first test on a staging site before updating your production site.

If you’re interested in what’s new in PHP 7.4, check out php.net’s migration guide.

Preview images were not generated when you upload a PDF to your WordPress media library. This is now fixed.

We’ve managed to significantly reduce the default memory footprint of MySQL. It now works well for new servers with just 1 GB of memory. MySQL will now restart itself if it crashes as well.

Site cloning allows you to quickly create a complete copy of an existing site on SpinupWP, which includes all files, the database, and server configuration (Nginx and PHP-FPM). Cloning is useful for creating staging sites and for quickly testing server configuration changes. For example, you could test upgrading your site to a newer version of PHP in an isolated manner without impacting your production site.

To clone a site, head over to the site’s settings screen and click ‘Clone Site’ in the top right corner.

This will open the site cloning wizard, where you can configure the new domain, database, and site settings (PHP version, page cache). For git-based sites, you will also be able to select the new branch to check out and modify your deploy script (if required).

We’ve deployed what we call Domain Redirects. Previously you could add Alternate Domains in addition to your Primary Domain and they would all be configured to serve your site:

So if you visited one of these Alternate Domains, the domain would stay in the browser bar:

But oftentimes you don’t want the domain to stay in the browser bar. You want it to 301 redirect. So we’ve reworked the UI here, giving each domain its own text field with a toggle button to make it a redirect:

Now you can 301 redirect any of the Additional Domains to the Primary Domain with a simple click.

When provisioning a new server, you’ll see a newer version of Nginx (1.16).

A newer release of MariaDB (10.4) is available as an option when provisioning a new server.

When provisioning a new server, you will now have MySQL 8 as an option.

If there’s a whole section of your site that you want exempt from the full page caching, you can now specify the URL path in the new Page Cache settings screen:

You can also adjust the cache expiration time.

If the server you’re connecting to is running SSH on a port other than the default port 22, you can now specify it when first provisioning the server, or change it later on from the server settings screen: