We hope this message finds you well.

As you may already be aware, Red Hat has made some decisions with their CentOS operating system which have resulted in a need for all cPanel servers to be eventually migrated to a new cPanel-supported operating system.

Please note that this is a decision that has been made outside of UK-US Hosting & Web Design's jurisdiction, and all web-hosting providers are being equally impacted. Our Systems Engineers and Administrators have been keeping up with the situation as it unfolds and working diligently to provide all of our clients with an upgrade path forward.

Due to Red Hat's decision to change CentOS from a downstream (stable) to an upstream (development) branch of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, CentOS 8 has already reached end-of-life and will not be considered an eligible upgrade target. You can read more about this news here: https://blog.cpanel.com/centos-8-end-of-life-announcement/.

The operating systems we will be able to offer continued managed support for are AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8, and CloudLinux 8, all of which are binary-compatible RHEL forks based on the RHEL source code with official support as installation targets for cPanel.

We will utilize cPanel ELevate (https://cpanel.github.io/elevate/whitepaper/), which the cPanel team has developed to provide in-place, offline OS upgrades. We first perform an audit to identify any changes that need to be made to the server before the upgrade;

Before proceeding with the upgrade, a complete block-level backup of your server is created on a temporary disk and set aside in case any issues arise during the upgrade process. 

We will make the upgrades for all clients for their business security.

All clients should be keeping off-site backups of mission-critical information, sites, and systems. If you do not have off-site backups, please make them before the upgrade or ask us to do this for you. This means that if you do not take and maintain some sort of backup of your data before the upgrade it could potentially be lost PERMANENTLY in the case of a failed upgrade or restoration.

In all upgrade options, we will try our best to ensure that the new operating system is as close as can be to the old one. Please note, that while we do try our best, we cannot catch everything. We check what we can but have previously come across unknown software in the past, as servers are extremely dynamic and there is always a possibility of software or configurations that exist outside of cPanel.

If you are aware of any software or configuration that was set up outside of cPanel by yourself, our team, or a third party, we urge you to let us know. We cannot be held responsible for any software/configurations not managed by cPanel that is not carried over once the upgrade has already been completed.

On a final note, and of importance to all upgrade options, the following software requirements must be met before proceeding with any upgrade option.

• MySQL or MariaDB need to be upgraded to 8.0+ or 10.3+ respectively on the original server to ensure compatibility.
• Any sites using PHP 7.1 or lower MUST be updated to use PHP 7.2+. Only PHP 7.2+ is supported.
• Nameserver must be PowerDNS. BIND is NOT supported on any of the target OS.

We have allocated your service, vanguard.ukushosting.com, into the following dates and time to perform an upgrade.

July 8-12, 2024 8pm BST

We will begin running prechecks to determine what work needs to be done to your server before the upgrade. After all necessary changes are made, we will verify a date/time (including time zone) to perform the upgrade.

We understand that this is a lot of information to keep in mind.

If you have any questions or concerns you would like us to address, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.