Kontrol7

Cloudflare-hosted domains get every record they should, backups are proven far more widely, and a stale copy of a domain stops being served.

Added

• New mail domains are backed up automatically. With automatic protection switched on, a new mail domain now gets a backup the same way a new website does. Mailboxes hold correspondence, and they were the one thing a new site arrived with that had no backup.

Changed

• A publishing problem with Cloudflare is reported once, with the reason. Instead of an entry every five minutes, the activity feed and alerts say once when records start failing and once when they recover, and the domain's page lists which records Cloudflare refused and why.
• The activity feed says what an automatic repair actually did. Instead of just "platform healed", the entry now names what was repaired and how many times.

Fixed

• Mail-app setup records now reach Cloudflare. For a domain whose DNS is served by Cloudflare, the records that let Outlook, Apple Mail and phones set themselves up (SRV), plus CAA, TLSA, HTTPS and similar records, were refused by Cloudflare and never published. They are now sent in the form Cloudflare requires, and Cloudflare's own spelling of them is no longer mistaken for a change.
• A domain moved to Cloudflare stops being served by the old nameserver. The nameserver a domain had originally been placed on kept answering for it after the domain was linked to Cloudflare, with an out-of-date copy. It now stops, like every other nameserver.
• Restore checks reach every backup, not a sample. The weekly restore check took one backup per server per run, so a server holding many databases could go months without any of them being proven. Each run now takes the backups checked longest ago, however they are spread across servers, so every backup is proven inside the window you set.
• The domain page no longer offers to link a domain that is already linked. While the page was loading, it could briefly claim the platform's own nameservers served a Cloudflare domain. It now says it is reading, and says so plainly if it could not read.
• The preview zone cannot be deleted while new sites rely on it. Deleting the zone that gives every new site its preview name is now refused, the same way deleting the zone that holds the nameservers' own names already was.
• A busy OpenLiteSpeed site is no longer reported as down. On a site served through OpenLiteSpeed, a health ping that had to wait for a busy PHP worker was reported as a failure while visitors were being served normally. It is now reported as inconclusive, and the request through OpenLiteSpeed decides.
• Old failures for deleted sites leave the Jobs attention list. A failed job for something that has since been deleted is cleared automatically, so Needs attention shows only things someone can act on.

Upgrading

Nothing to do for the update itself. Mail domains created before this release are not given a backup automatically: open Backups and press Protect on any that are listed as unprotected.

Why

A live audit of a running platform found places where the panel reported success for something that was not happening: DNS records that never reached Cloudflare, restore checks that reached only a fraction of backups, and a nameserver still answering for a domain that had moved. Each of those is fixed here, and the platform now says so when it happens again.

Busy nodes run more quietly: fewer needless restarts, quicker recovery, and less load on DNS and databases.

Fixed

• A change restarts a service once, not once per site. Work that applies to the whole node now runs once for the node, instead of being repeated for every site on it.
• A PHP service that fails to restart is tried again. If php-fpm does not come back after a restart, the next reconcile cycle restarts it instead of leaving the site down until someone notices.
• DNS is asked far less often. Each zone is looked up once per cycle rather than once for every record in it.
• Health checks no longer use the database connections your sites need. Monitoring now keeps its own connections, so it never competes with your sites for the connection limit.

Why

A node hosting many sites should do each piece of housekeeping once. Doing it once per site made every change louder than it needed to be, and let a failed restart go unnoticed.

Fixed

• OpenLiteSpeed was never once started. The service was being started by a unit name that does not exist on Debian, where it is called lsws. Every site configured for OpenLiteSpeed had been served by the fallback instead, quietly and since the feature shipped. Worth stating plainly because nothing failed loudly: the sites worked, so the only symptom was that .htaccess handling and LSCache were not doing anything. Both now are.

Added

• Ready-made plans for every kind. A new install no longer starts with an empty catalogue and a blank plan form. Shared hosting, reseller, VPS, DNS and database each come with a sensible starting plan that can be added on demand and then edited, rather than composed from grants before anything is sellable. This is the half that makes a fresh install demonstrable on the day it is installed.

The provider half of the catalogue contract, so a billing system can ask what is genuinely sellable instead of being told what exists.

Added

• Plan kinds. shared_hosting, reseller_hosting, database, email, dns and vps, each with the grants it is allowed to carry. A grant a kind does not sell is refused with a message naming it.
• VPS sizes as real bounds. 1-32 vCPU, 512 MB - 256 GB memory, 10 GB - 2 TB disk, applied per machine. An order naming no size gets the plan size; one above it is refused rather than quietly billed.
• Where each kind can be sold, right now. A location qualifies only when a node there holds every role the kind needs, accepts placement, reports a fresh heartbeat and is under the capacity watermark. DNS is served everywhere and so has no location picker at all.
• Measured facts per kind — the images a VPS can boot, the database engines available, the record types DNS supports — so a product page can claim these and nothing else. Email is built as a kind but reports itself unsellable until a mail node at that location passes mail readiness, so nothing proposes it before it would work.

Fixed

• Ubuntu site containers boot. An AppArmor signal rule was missing, so a container on an Ubuntu base came up and then could not be signalled. Sites on Debian were unaffected, which is why it took a while to see.
• The builder fails fast. It was continuing past an error and producing an image that looked finished, so the failure surfaced later and somewhere less obvious.
• Domains are canonicalised at create, not on first use. A domain that differed only in case or a trailing dot could produce two records for one name.

Added

• Node and Python sites in the create form, beside PHP.
• Clearer labels on the create form, which had been naming implementation details rather than choices.

Fixed

• Every offered PHP branch builds. 8.5 needed opcache and 8.0 needed ionCube; both were listed as available and neither produced a working image. A version you can pick and cannot run is worse than one you cannot pick.
• The WordPress floor is 7.4. The extension set WordPress actually requires is now asserted, rather than assumed from the branch number.

Changed

• Compliance wording, so the page says what is measured rather than what is aspired to.

Fixed

• A refused reinstall keeps its application. The refusal was being treated as a completed operation, so the site lost what was installed on it while the machine stayed exactly as it was. The worst shape of bug: nothing failed loudly and something was gone.
• Deleted DNS zones end. A zone removed in the panel was left being served, so a name that should have stopped resolving carried on.

Added

• www is automatic. Adding example.com gets you www.example.com too, with the certificate covering both — rather than a support ticket a week later from someone whose visitors typed the other one.
• Project SSH keys, so access follows the project rather than being pasted per machine.
• Reverse DNS on virtual machines, which mail on a VM needs and nothing else will do.
• Recipe apps served over HTTPS from the moment they are installed.
• Redis available by default rather than as a request.

Changed

• A node can now be one of our own VMs, which makes a small platform possible without dedicated hardware for every role.