Today we’re announcing a new feature in Cloud to help with the data processing location for European customers, one for helping customers fix sites that may be experiencing errors without opening a ticket, and expanded capacity, too.
Privacy Shield and GDPR Compliance
In May 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation will be fully in effect across the EU. To ease the burden of compliance for MODX Cloud customers, we now store all Backups and Snapshots for each data center in offsite locations near the data centers themselves.
In other words, none of your customer data (websites) will ever be stored or processed in the US unless you specifically request that or choose a US data center for your location.
Combined with coverage by the existing Privacy Shield compliance from our data center provider, IBM Bluemix, you can rest assured that your data will be stored and processed in locations which are compliant with this important EU regulation. For more information please see: IBM compliance coverage.
Data backup locations for the public platforms now is handled in the following regions:
| Platform | Location | Object Storage Backup Location |
|---|---|---|
| AMS | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | AWS S3 EU-Central-1, Frankfurt |
| FRA | Frankfurt, Germany | AWS S3 EU-Central-1, Frankfurt |
| LON | London, UK | AWS S3 EU-West-2, London |
| SYD | Sydney, Australia | AWS S3 AP-Southeast-2, Sydney |
| TX | Texas, United States | AWS S3 US-East-1, Virginia |
Note: You may still have legacy manual Backups or Snapshots stored in the original AWS S3 US West region. Please contact us if you have any concerns over those. Premium account owners can also request specific locations on individual Clouds or for your entire Account.
PHP Resets
Sometimes a website shows a 504 or 502 error. This results in users having to open a support ticket to request a restart of PHP and bring their site back online. This is typically due to a long-running PHP processes, slow or down external dependencies (like data feeds), or occasionally a bug in PHP itself. But having to open a support ticket is not ideal when you need to get things done, especially with a looming deadline.
Today you no longer need to open a ticket: from your cloud view page in the right column simply choose the “Reset PHP” option. It will kill all the current connections to your PHP worker pool and should restore PHP operation to its non-overloaded state within a few seconds.
Additional Capacity
In conjunction with additional performance tuning for all platforms, we added our third platform to our Texas data center option. This brings our total public platform in the Central US to three. Kudos to anyone who points out what we just did there. ;)
Other Upcoming Changes
In addition to the recently highlighted upcoming changes, we have two other items to point out that will be changing later this year:
Usage-based billing: the vast majority of users easily fit within their existing MODX Cloud plan. However some customer really do push usage to the max and consume more storage than provided in their plan. Starting in November, we’ll be either switching customers to larger plans, or add a storage upgrade fee to their plans as has been outlined on the MODX Cloud site itself. This will be followed with traffic based usage billing in 2018. To prepare for storage billing, you might wish to cut down on Backup frequency or delete some Snapshots or Backups, or delete any old test Clouds in your account.
Node.js upgrade: after the Node.js project transitions to version 8.x LTS at the end of this month, we will only support that version until version 10.x LTS in October 2018. Please check your Node.js workflow tools to ensure they’ll work with the latest LTS version of Node, or reply to this email if you have any concerns.
More To Come
We always strive to improve service and support, and can’t wait to share some more developments soon. If you have any idea or request, we’d love to hear from you.