Although we haven’t posted to the blog in a bit, that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy behind the scenes. Quite the opposite!

Here are a few things we’ve been busy working on lately…

Upcoming TLS 1.0 End of Life Preps (PCI related)

I’m actually quite shocked this isn’t a much bigger issue being discussed, especially in the web hosting and ecommerce arenas. We have a blog post about the upcoming TLS 1.0 deadlines for ecommerce merchants.

There are likely thousands of servers out there that are not set up to support anything higher than TLS 1.0. Once shipping companies and payment gateways (especially PayPal) disable TLS 1.0, there will be a lot of broken online stores.

For us here at LexiConn, we have been working hard to make sure all of our servers will be ready for the changes. We are on track to have all servers fully compatible with TLS 1.2. We are alerting clients running older ShopSite stores of the requirement to upgrade to the latest ShopSite version that fully supports TLS 1.2.

For PHP based carts such as Magento or WooCommerce, PHP will be upgraded on all servers (technically curl) to support TLS 1.2 connections, so there should be no issues once services start removing TLS 1.0.

Latest ShopSite version – 12 SP2r3

ShopSite has released a new version, 12 SP2r3, which has many new features, bug fixes, 64-bit support, and full TLS 1.2 support for shipping and payment services. We were busy helping ShopSite beta test the new version, and have been rolling it out to merchants who have requested the upgrade.

If you are running a ShopSite store, and are not at the latest release, we highly recommend upgrading, especially if you use PayPal, any real-time shipping rates, or a payment gateway like Authorize.net. Soon the latest version of ShopSite will be required for most of these services to continue working.

Magento 2.0

We’ve been busy working with the new Magento 2 version that was released at the end of last year. From submitting code changes and bug reports, to testing performance vs. Magento 1, we have been improving our knowledge and support for this new ecommerce platform.

There are a number of improvements and security processes a web host can put in place to optimize Magento 2. We have put a lot of time and testing into these areas so our Magento 2 ecommerce clients can have the best environment in terms of performance and security. We continue to refine this as Magento 2 matures and grows.

We have applied our proactive security patching of Magento 1 to include Magento 2 when security updates / patches are released. ALL Magento clients are patched for security releases once tested on our end (unless they have opted out of this service). Just one more way we help keep our Magento merchants safe and secure.

We have also improved our Magento monitoring system – Monitoring each Magento website we host for being up, accessible, free of errors, *and* loading quickly. If there are any issues, we are alerted right away and will take proactive steps to correct the problem.

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Hopefully this “peek behind the curtain” gives you a good idea of what we have been up to for the start of 2016. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.