An upcoming change to the SMTP/Outgoing mail server configuration may affect your ability to send out mail.  The upcoming change will require SSL/TLS connections on all outbound SMTP/outgoing mail server connections.  Up until now, our servers have required SMTP Authentication in order for you to relay out mail through our servers.  Using a secure and TLS encrypted connection was always encouraged, but was not required.  This upcoming change will make the TLS encryption a required setting.

(As a side note – TLS is the appropriate name for connecting to services securely on the Internet.  Originally this was referred to as SSL.  SSL was developed by Netscape back in the 1990s.  In 1999 the IETF organization took over the publishing of the secure standard and renamed it TLS to give it a more neutral name.  Having said all of that, you will still see applications referring to the setting as SSL, it's just a naming convention that is difficult for some companies to drop.  The last update to the actual SSL standard was nearly 20 years.  No modern application is going to be using that standard even if they still refer to it as SSL)

This is all part of a larger movement to insure that Internet connections are encrypted and secure.  This is especially true for any situation where you are passing a username and password or other sensitive information.

Most modern email clients are defaulting to secure TLS encrypted connections when you setup your email account in your email application.  I do not expect this change to affect a large percentage of our users, because chances are your email application is already using a secure TLS connection.

No other changes are required if you are affected by this.  There are no mail server hostname changes to be made or anything like that.  You simply need to instruct your email application to use a secure or TLS connection when connecting to our outgoing mail servers.

A quick look at the necessary settings to adjust if you are using Microsoft Mail as your email application is shown below:

Of course every email application is going to be a little different.  You would just need to identify and enable the necessary option in your email application.

We are working on compiling a list of affected email accounts – that we can see from the server side – that are still not using secure TLS encryption.  We will try to start sending out notices to those affected accounts next week.  Depending on just how many accounts are affected and what email applications are being used, we may create additional tutorial pages for how to update the appropriate settings for those email applications.

 

Beginning on December 2, 2024 we will be switching accounts that are currently using PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.2.

Official support for PHP 8.0 ended about a year ago, on November 26, 2023. It is time for this version of PHP to begin being retired. Accounts created within the past 6 months have had their PHP version set to PHP 8.2 by default.

In addition to the phasing out PHP 8.0 we will begin offering PHP 8.3 on our servers. A look at the PHP lifetimes for current and recent PHP versions:

PHP 8.0 – End-of-Life, ended November 26, 2023
PHP 8.1 – ending December 31, 2025
PHP 8.2 – ending December 31, 2026
PHP 8.3 – ending December 31, 2027
PHP 8.4 – ending December 31, 2028

PHP 8.4 is not yet available on our server – it was just released a few days ago. Generally PHP versions go through several minor revisions after being released before they are deemed to be production ready.

Why is this important?
A lot of web hosting service providers will continue to allow end-of-life versions of PHP to be used on their servers. We tend to believe that security is important to our web hosting clients. The issue with using end-of-life versions of PHP is not the PHP version itself, per se. The issue is the scripts that rely on those end-of-life versions of PHP, what we refer to as the low hanging fruit of security and vulnerabilities in the web hosting environment.

A script (or plugin, theme, extension, component, addon, etc) may have been written back in 2021 – during PHP 8.0’s prime. If that script was released in 2021 and then never, ever touched again by its developer – then that script is abandoned. A reputable script is going to be maintained by its developer to keep it efficient and to address any known security holes. A script that is abandoned has no such assurances of being efficient or safe and secure of any known security holes.

By rotating out end-of-life versions of PHP this brings these abandoned scripts to the forefront. By now, any reputable script developer would have updated their code to work with current in-life versions of PHP, since PHP 8.0 went end-of-life on November 26, 2023. If a script has problems handling the update from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.1 or PHP 8.2, then you either do not have the latest version of that script installed or the script has been abandoned by its developers. This is why rotating out end-of-life versions of PHP is important.

Having said all of that, we are not yet fully removing PHP 8.0 from our servers. If you have issues with your website handling the switch to a current in-life version of PHP, we can still temporarily downgrade your account to PHP 8.0. However, you need to be aware that this is only temporary. You need to use this time to resolve the issues with the scripts on your website to bring them up to date.

On January 1, 2025 we will again switch any account that has been downgraded to PHP 8.0 back to a current in-life version of PHP. If the issues with your website’s script still haven’t been resolved then you will need to consider upgrading your web hosting plan to have the account migrated to a server with extended PHP support. Extended PHP support will allow you to run your website on PHP 8.0 while you continue to make efforts to resolve the issues with your website and current in-life versions of PHP.

The purpose of all of this is to continue to provide you safe and secure web hosting environment. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Summary: If your intention is to use your web hosting account mainly for your website and your website relies mostly on HTML, PHP Scripts, and images – then the amount of disk space you really need may be minimal. Sure, more disk space for the same price might be appealing – but are you ever going to need that disk space? Why not focus on other server peripherals, like disk space, server response time, server reliability, and hosting provider reputation when choosing a web hosting provider?

In a previous post we learned that the average disk space being used by our accounts is right at 1.8GB. That kind of makes you wonder why web hosting companies are trying to sell you gobs of disk space that you do not need and will likely never use. A better approach might be to consider a reasonable amount of disk space on super fast solid state disks that do not have any moveable parts and can provide super fast load and response times.

To take this a step further, we decided to take a look at where specifically the disk space is being used on these accounts. If an average account is using 1.8GB of disk space – where is that disk space being used at and for what purpose? The results were interesting to us.

How did we conduct this survey? Well for this survey, we couldn’t take a look at all of our accounts… there was just too many. So we took a look at 100 random accounts that were using between 1.5GB and 5.5GB of disk space. Then from that we broke down the disk space usage into 8 categories: HTML Files, PHP Files, Mail, Image Files, Video Files, Zip files, Tar.gz files, and then any Other files. Did we mis-characterize some files? Probably. But our hope is that since we took 100 random samples, then the chances of this skewing the results is slim.

HTML	0.296%
PHP	2.308%
Mail	43.315%
Images	14.077%
Videos	3.186%
Zip	7.941%
Targz	7.219%
Other	21.657%

What’s interesting about these results is that far and away the largest percentage of the disk space is being used by email stored on the account. This is not all that surprising that this is the case, but the surprising part is by how much. The 43.3% being used by mail is over twice of the disk usage of the next category – the hard to define Other category – and over 3 times more than the next highest, Images. This tells us that mail is a huge part of web hosting when it comes to disk space storage.

The other takeaway from this is just how little HTML and PHP files factor into this, about 2.6% of the disk space is used by these two file types.

Video storage was small at 3.2% but this also factors into what type of website you are going to be using. The majority of websites are not video specific – only 31 of the 100 accounts had any videos to count. The issue with video is that if your website is heavily reliant on video, chances are really good that you are going to know about this and you’re going to have a much firmer grip on what your disk space needs are. The purpose of this study is more for general use – people that may not understand exactly how much disk space they need or where it’s being used.

Zip files, Tar.gz files, and likely a lot of the files in the Other category refer to mostly backup files – where users may choose to keep a backup of their account or script readily available on their web hosting account. A lot of times this space can be reclaimed if the user will download the backup files to their own computer for save keeping and delete the copy on the web hosting server.

This study was definitely interesting. And it gives us food for thought on how we might be better able to offer plans to better fit our customers needs. The big takeaway from all of this… if you’re puzzled by just how much disk space you really need for a web hosting plan… first consider if you’re website is going to be hosting a lot of videos, if it’s not then consider how you can manage the email accounts you expect to host on the account. Can you manage the disk space being used for those accounts? Perhaps even consider an alternative mail setup – we can help you with that. Outside of those two items – your disk space needs are probably going to be a lot less than you may see advertised with other web hosting providers. Consider other factors, like speed of the disks, are they SSD? Has that web hosting company been in business long enough to be equipped to handle factors like these?

There are a lot of factors that go into choosing a reliable web hosting provider. We encourage people to take a deeper look at what different web hosting providers offer instead of just focusing on the “bigger is better” in terms of raw numbers.

Summary: How much disk space do you really need for a web hosting account? This is a common question and isn’t always obvious to a casual observer. As with any question, seeking out information is the best way to answer these questions. You might see a web hosting offer with a boatload of disk space, but if you’re never going to use that much disk space does it make better sense to spend money on smaller amounts with a reputable and support-oriented company? Does it make sense to focus more on the speed of the disk space and web hosting than to throw money at disk space you’re never going to use? We found that the average disk space used by our clients is only 1.8GB and 77% of our client base falls under this amount. So chances are really good that you’re never going to use over 1.8GB of disk space on a web hosting account. Interesting in how we calculated this? Keep reading.

To take a closer look at this – we used statistics to get an idea of how much disk space is being used and how it is being used.

To start – we have a small confession to make – the actual average disk space used per account is 2.9GB, but this figure incorporates some really large accounts. This tends to happen when you’ve been in the web hosting business for more than 20 years. So why the difference between 1.8GB and 2.9GB? The answer… statistical favorite – standard deviation.

Standard deviation tells you how close together a group of numbers are. If all the numbers in your group are the same – that’s going to yield a standard deviation of 0. The closer your numbers are to each other, the closer the standard deviation is going to be to 0.

When we take the standard deviation of the full set of account disk space used – the group that averages 2.9GB of disk space used – we get a standard deviation of 12GB. That seems quite a bit high! When we cut off just the top 2% of our disk space users – leaving just the bottom 98% – we get an average disk space usage of 1.8GB and a standard deviation of 3.7GB. That standard deviation is still probably a little high – meaning that we could probably cut this some more to get an even better representation of the casual user – but you can see that by cutting just the top 2% off, the standard deviation of the remaining group drops down by over 8GB. What does all of this mean? Well, for the purpose of this exercise we’re going to consider the top 2% of our users as a special case – these are users that, for whatever reason, use a ton of disk space (they average about 57GB) and they don’t represent the vast majority of our users. Chances are, if you’re using this much disk space… you’re not a casual observer and you know that you are using a lot of disk space.

In statistics, measurements are made in terms of how many standard deviations a subset of values is over the average. For example, if our average disk usage is 1.8GB and the standard deviation is 3.7GB, then 5.5GB (1.8+3.7) would be +1 standard deviation over the average, 9.2GB (1.8+3.7+3.7) would be +2 standard deviations over the average. This breaks down as follows:

Average	1.8GB
+1 Standard Deviations	5.5GB
+2 Standard Deviations	9.2GB
+3 Standard Deviations	12.9GB
+4 Standard Deviations	16.6GB

How does this break down in terms of percent of users using less than these amounts?

Less than 1.8GB	77%
Less than 5,5GB	90%
Less than 9.2GB	95%
Less than 12.9GB	97%
Less than 16.6GB	98%

This means to the casual observer, there is a 90% chance you’re never going to use over 5.5GB of disk space on your web hosting account. Sure an offer of 50GB of disk space might look enticing, but what are you giving up for that deal? Is the web hosting company reputable? How long have they been in business? Can they answer your support related questions? Are they using SSD disks for blazing fast disk I/O? Are they just using a big number to try and hook you in? Knowing exactly how much disk space you need can help you make a better informed decision.

At BlazingHost we offer plans with disk space amounts of 3GB, 7GB, 10GB, and 15GB. These numbers were chosen specifically based on the data we have of current disk space usage. When you look at our disk space offerings and the percent of our client base that falls under each category:

Less than 3GB	85%
Less than 7GB	93%
Less than 10GB	95%
Less than 15GB	98%

We make an effort to give all of our clients an affordable option that fits their needs. Our 3GB offering – our least expensive plan – is good enough for 85% of our client base. A 10GB offering is good enough for 95% of our client base.

We hope that you find this post informative. The purpose of this post is to provide information so that individuals have a better idea of how much disk space they really need for a web hosting account.