As explained in the blog, there was a time when we applied monitoring alerts to all Cloud Containers, even unmanaged ones, so we could keep a close eye on the platform. That's no longer necessary, so we're taking this internal monitoring off unmanaged Cloud Containers. Newer containers, managed servers, and alerts and monitoring that you have set up for yourself are all unaffected. As always you can add your own monitoring or add Server Management today.
MariaDB 11.8 is now available as an integrated database option for Cloud Containers. You can select it as a database host directly from the Add Databases page, giving you access to the latest features and improvements in MariaDB.
The SiteHost Dockerhub account now contains public versions of our latest PHP web images, integrated database images, and our pma image. Each one matches a Cloud Container image, with all the essential files baked in. The blog has more news and the Knowledge Base explains how to use these images to develop websites in a local environment that matches production Cloud Containers as closely as possible.
View a Cloud Container in the Control Panel and you'll see more detailed information about container maintenance in the Manage tab, depending on whether your server is managed or unmanaged, and the type of container you're looking at. Service containers are excluded from the automatic patching routines that apply to managed servers.
Stop worrying about the encoding of environment variables. Next time you add or update a variable, whatever you enter into the Variable contents field is exactly what will be stored. Also, if you want to delete a variable via the API you now need to explicitly delete them, rather than just provide a blank value. Read up on environment variables in the KB.
Cloud Container labels can now include unicode characters, which means that macrons and other diacritics are supported. In situations like containers labelled with internationalised domain names (IDNs), this keeps things properly aligned.
Container cloning has been a feature of managed Cloud Containers for years, but until now it wasn't available for custom images. There are now no restrictions on the containers you can duplicate, so long as your Cloud Containers are managed by us. The next step, overwriting custom containers, remains a work in progress. Read about Container cloning on the Knowledge Base.
Add a new Cloud Container server (either standard or High Performance) and you'll be allocated 5-15GB more storage than before. That's because, as the blog explains, some files and data that wouldn't have counted against your limit in the past will now be stored where they belong. We are also in the progress of bringing every other Cloud Container server into line with the new plans.
Also known as Noble Numbat, Ubuntu 24.04 is the latest long-term support (LTS) release. This upgrade, which applies to every Cloud Container server, guarantees standard OS support through to 2029. It also boasts the new 6.8 Linux kernel, security improvements (bye-bye TLS 1.0, 1.1 and DTLS 1.0), an updated Docker package, a solution to the 2038 problem, and a number of other improvements.
If your available storage on your Cloud Container server drops to 10% or 5GB (whichever is lower), a warning email is now triggered. This starts a 3-hour window for you to free up space or add storage. After that time, we'll treat a further drop to 5% or 2.5GB as a signal to permanently add 5GB. As the Knowledgebase explains, this change effectively automates a manual process.