This weekend we’ll be changing the way customer domains interact with PHP on the main web server. After we make this change, rather than everyone sharing a common PHP process, each PHP request will be owned by the user who owns the files in that directory.

This technique, known as SuPHP, has benefits for both you the customer and us as system administrators. For you, it means you’ll be able to use WordPress’ built-in updater for core, plugins, and themes (among other benefits). For us, it means we’ll be able to see at a glance which Apache processes are consuming a lot of resources – we’ll be able to know immediately who has the busy sites. This will greatly add in trouble shooting.

And for all of us, it means more security.

Your site may experience a brief bit of downtime while this conversion happens. We’ll manually check all sites after the upgrade it complete to make sure all sites are working properly.

Update: This work has been completed and all is well, as near as we can tell. Please let us know if you encounter any unexpected issues with your site(s).