2. Upgrades
   - WordPress, ZenCart and MediaWiki one-click-installs has been upgraded in January
   - Ruby on Rails has been upgraded and a number of new gems has been installed
   - PHP 5.2 and Zend Optimizer 3.2.2 is being rolled out the upcoming week.
3. Webmail
   Two more webmail machines has been added to the load-balanced webmail cluster, which should have improved the webmail performance dramatically.
4. SFTP users
   You can now choose between three types of user accounts:
   - FTP accounts – file transfer access only
   - SFTP accounts – sftp (SSH ftp) file transfer access only
   - Shell account – allows FTP plus ssh/telnet access
   The new SFTP account is great if you want to take advantage of the increased security of a SFTP account, without giving the user a shell account.
5. Promo codes in referral links
   You can now include a promo code in rewards link, so the promo code field on the signup form will be pre-filled with that code. Just use a link of the following type:
   http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?USERNAME/signup|PROMOCODE
   Complete instructions
6. DHSOTM
   DreamHost Site of the Month: Lifeshots

MySQL 5 has been upgraded from 5.0.18 to 5.0.24a.
Read changelog…

PHP 4 has been upgraded from 4.4.2 to 4.4.4.
Read changelog…

You can keep track of the current versions of PHP, MySQL and Ruby on Rails at http://php.dreamhosters.com and http://rails.dreamhosters.com.

The Manage Domains form has been changed accordingly:

Before: Manage Domains – With Apache Module settings

Now: Manage Domains – Without Apache Module settings

I haven’t seen any official explanation of this step yet, but I’ve seen two support replies with the following text:

Sorry about the confusion! All new domains added to the control panel (or ones you change settings for, like that) currently run as CGI. There’s no longer an option to choose PHP as an Apache module, so everything’s all CGI-upped.

We actually removed the Apache module feature as it turned out to be causing higher loads than the former. Go figure, huh?

Source: QiRan.org

I have to update the Wiki on that – we disabled the use of turning off PHP as CGI as this was becoming an issue since when you turn it off, your applications run under Apache’s memory space, which then makes it hard for us to determine who is using resources.

Source: DreamHost Discussion Forum

So currently it isn’t clear if the reason to stop offering PHP as an Apache Module is increasing use of resources, or difficulties tracking the use of resources or maybe both, but hopefully we will get an unambiguously explanation from DreamHost soon.

If you any more info on this change, please post a comment…

Updated:
Make sure to read the comments for Pete’s explanation of the change (Pete is working for DreamHost Support).

PDO offers a lightweight, consistent interface for accessing databases in PHP. PDO provides a data-access abstraction layer, which means that, regardless of which database you’re using, you use the same functions to issue queries and fetch data. PDO does not provide a database abstraction; it doesn’t rewrite SQL or emulate missing features. You should use a full-blown abstraction layer if you need that facility (like ADODB or Pear DB).

This means that you use the same functions to connect and query a MySQL database and a SQLite database (the only databases currently supported by PDO at DreamHost). This allows developers to code without worrying about the seperate commands for each database.

A couple of tutorials to get you started:

• First steps with PDO by Wez Furlong, developer of the extension
• Introduction to PDO (PowerPoint) by Ilia Alshanetsky, PHP developer
• Introduction to PHP 5 PDO at Sitepoint (Furlong’s comments)
• Connect PHP to DB2 and Cloudscape via PDO by Wez Furlong
• The PHP Data Object Abstraction Layer and Oracle by Wez Furlong

The last two tutorials is about DB2 and Oracle, which is currently not supported by the PHP setup at DreamHost, but the tutorials has lots of info, and you can always compile your own PHP, if you need to use it.

The upgrade to 5.1.0 is a major update and includes:

• A complete rewrite of date handling code, with improved timezone support
• Significant performance improvements compared to PHP 5.0.X
• PDO extension is now enabled by default
• Over 30 new functions in various extensions and built-in functionality
• Bundled libraries, PCRE and SQLite upgraded to latest versions
• Over 400 various bug fixes
• PEAR upgraded to version 1.4.5
• A number of important security fixes

The update to 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 consists mainly of a fair number of bug fixes and addresses three security issues.

The changes from 4.3.10 to 4.4.1 are only maintenance releases addressing numerous non-critical bux fixes, a number of security fixes related to the overwriting of the GLOBALS array and a memory corruption problem. No new features has been added.

RoundCube Webmail is a browser-based email client with a very nice interface and functionality a bit like GMail, but available to install on your own server. TurboDbAdmin is an online database administration tool like phpMyAdmin (which is currently being used at DreamHost’s servers), but with a simpler and more dynamic interface. Both applications are in their early beta-stages, and are still laking some features, but you can get a good grasp of what you can expect to see within the next few months.

If you already now would like to tryout RoundCube, hookturns has written a short tutorial about Setting up RoundCube on DreamHost.