Magento today announced the general availability of Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1 and Community Edition 2.1. According to the announcement, this release offers many new features to increase both sales and team productivity, while also simplifying PCI compliance. You can now:

• Increase conversion rates with a streamlined PayPal In-context Checkout experience.
• Store credit cards with PayPal so returning customers can quickly check out without re-entering their payment information.
• Simplify PCI compliance while controlling your checkout design using Braintree Hosted Fields.
• Improve productivity with new Admin search capabilities and redesigned product, category, and CMS pages.
• Deliver better search results with a new tool to manage search synonyms at a store view, website, or global level.

Learn more about the new features and enhancements in Magento 2.1 in this blog post or check out the release notes.

New System Requirements

With version 2.1, Magento drop support for PHP 5.5. The new system requirements are:

• PHP 5.6
• PHP 7.0.2
• PHP 7.0.6 + up until 7.1
• MySQL 5.6

We will be rolling out an update to all our M2 hosting servers in the next few days to accommodate the latest requirements.

After we added LiteMage Cache support to our Magento hosting platform last year, it has helped store owners dramatically improve their page speed with very little efforts, thanks to the built-in caching functionality of the LiteSpeed Enterprise web server and the Litemage Magento extension. Until now the Litemage feature has only been available for Magento 1.x which was unfortunate since more and more users are making the leap to Magento 2.

Today LiteSpeed announced LiteMage 2, which is finally Magento 2 compatible! LiteMage 2 simplifies your stack (requiring only the LiteMage Extension and LiteSpeed Web Server) while providing greater performance gains than either Magento’s built-in PageCache or Varnish. In the majority of cases LiteMage Cache can improve your stores’ performance out-of-box, with no extra configuration necessary. This is possible as LiteMage is built directly into LiteSpeed Web Server, allowing HTTPS, HTTP/2, and cached pages to all be handled in a single application.

LiteMage takes Magento 2’s improved performance and turbo-charges it, bringing the speed, scalability, and ease-of-use you’ve come to expect from LiteSpeed to Magento’s newest platform.

LiteMage Cache is included free of charge on all ProperHost Magento hosting plans, and can be purchased as an optional addon on our dedicated and cloud servers. Feel free to contact our support department if you have any questions.

Yesterday, Magento 2.0.4 was released, bringing important functional and security updates to the latest commerce platform.

Important: Magento 2.0.4 replaces Magento 2.0.3, which was released the day before, to address a packaging issue. If you have already installed the original release, you must replace it with the new version to ensure that your site receives all security enhancements.

The new release is available for both Magento Enterprise Edition and Community Edition, and contains several security improvements, including:

• Prevents anonymous access to web APIs by default so that private information about the store, such as pricing, stock details, and upcoming promotions, are not disclosed without authentication. Merchants can still configure their APIs to support anonymous access if it is required by certain extensions. More information is available
• Sets limits on the number of Admin and Customer Token Access API password attempts allowed to help prevent brute force attempts to guess passwords.
• Fully resolves a previous issue with cross-site scripting so that attackers cannot enter an email address with malicious JavaScript code during customer registration on the storefront.
• Fixes multiple parameters in the Authorize.net payment module that were vulnerable to reflected cross-site scripting attacks.

For the full list of enhancements and upgrade instructions, see the official release notes for the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition.

ProperHost currently offers a free 30-day trial on all our Magento 2.0 compatible hosting plans, so make sure to try out the next generation e-commerce platform today!

We are pleased to announce that ProperHost has just partnered with Template Monster, one of the oldest and most renowned providers of high quality website templates on the Internet, which brings a vast collection of Magento templates to our users. By choosing a turnkey template for your Magento site you can quickly set up a beautiful and professional looking online store.

Go check out the templates here.

As previously announced, PHP 7 support has now been added to all our shared hosting servers. PHP 7 brings significant performance improvements over PHP 5.x and new language features that will help developers create better and more efficient code.

For backwards compatibility with Magento and other web applications, PHP 5 is still the default PHP version on our servers. PHP 7 can be enabled on a per-directory basis by adding the following code to the .htaccess file:

All .php files in the current directory and sub-directories will now be processed by PHP 7.

Please note that Magento 1.x does not officially support PHP 7. However, several blog posts exists which explains the steps needed to get it working. There is even an extension on GitHub that adds PHP 7 compatibility to Magento 1.9.2.2.

Disclaimer: ProperHost is not responsible for website crashes or damage caused by installing extensions or 3. party modules. We recommend to always create a backup first.