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Aqua Panel Feature Updates

The last few months have no doubt been some of the most difficult that we’ve ever experienced, and all of us here at Hostarium hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe during these trying times. Despite the world being pretty crazy right now, we haven’t been resting on our laurels. We’ve been hard at work, implementing new functionality into Aqua Panel. We’d like to go over some of these new features in Aqua Panel here.

One-Click Staging Sites

Conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t make changes to code on the live site. Although we provide robust backup functionality, it is always better to make changes on a separate staging environment. This is however a pretty daunting task for many, because it requires manually moving files and databases. This is before you factor in having to make your changes live.

Aqua Panel takes the work out of creating a staging environment, with a one click interface to create a staging copy. This will create an 1:1 clone of your live site under a new staging subdomain, and let you make whatever changes you want without affecting the live site. You’ll also continue to have access to a subset of the standard Aqua Panel functionality for your staging site, such as managing users and plugins.

One-Click Staging Site Deployment in Aqua Panel
Just one click to create a staging environment

And once you’re done with making your changes on the staging site, it’s another one-click to merge the staging environment back onto the live site

WordPress User Login

Aqua Panel now offers the ability to login directly as any user straight from the panel. No more fumbling around with resetting forgotten passwords. Just select the user you want and you’re in.

User Login in Aqua Panel
Login as any wordpress user with ease

CDN Support

Powered by KeyCDN, Aqua Panel now offers automatic CDN support. KeyCDN provide 34 network endpoints across six out of seven continents so your site’s visitors will always load static assets from the closest physical location to them.

phpMyAdmin

Aqua Panel now offers phpMyAdmin for managing your site’s database. You can update values via a simple UI as well as import and export SQL dumps.

 

We’re very excited with these new features in Aqua Panel, and we hope they make managing your site easier than ever. We’d love to hear your feedback on what we’ve added and what else you’d like to see!

Let’s Encrypt certificate issues

At hostarium, security is one of our primary focuses. Because of this all sites issued on our platform are provided with free SSL Certificates as standard powered by Let’s Encrypt.

Earlier today Let’s Encrypt issued a security notice, regarding a bug in their issuance code that resulted in them issuing a number of certificates incorrectly. Further details can be found here.

As a result, Let’s Encrypt are revoking the validity of a large number of certificates starting at 00:00 UTC on the 4th March 2020. Revoked certificates will no longer be valid and result in SSL warnings in your browser.
 
Although the number of affected SSLs managed by us was low, we took the decision to re-issue every certificate so that we could be 100% sure that every site running an SSL will continue to work without issues. All certificates have now been re-issued and are no longer at risk of revocation. The process was completed completely seamlessly and without any interruption to service.