Here are the most helpful changes for you:

Easier Website Testing & Management

• Temporary Domain Names: Ever wanted to start building your website before your domain name was officially registered or moved to us? You can now create a temporary domain to preview and test your site during development.
• Simplified Security: We’ve combined several security pages into one Unified SSL/TLS interface. This makes it much easier to see if your website’s “padlock” icon is active and up to date.
• Centralized Settings: You can now manage your account password, contact info and language preferences from one single location in cPanel, saving you from clicking through multiple menus.

Better Email Experience

• Webmail Filtering: You can now create and manage email filters (rules that automatically move or delete certain emails) directly inside Webmail. You no longer need to log into the main cPanel dashboard to organize your inbox.
• Enhanced Mail Security: We’ve upgraded our mail server software to improve performance. For your protection, this version requires stronger password security. If you haven’t changed your email password in many years, you may be prompted to update it to a more secure one.

Behind-the-Scenes Improvements

• Faster Performance: With upgrades to Perl and better support for modern operating systems, your hosting environment is now faster, more stable and better equipped to run the latest web applications.

This week was a busy one for our security team.

Rapid Response to the cPanel Authentication Vulnerability

On Tuesday, April 28th, a critical vulnerability was identified in cPanel (CVE-2026-41940). This flaw was particularly serious because it allowed for an “authentication bypass”—essentially meaning an attacker could gain administrative access to a server without needing a password.

Because we stay active in core industry security circles, we were alerted to this risk early. Following best practices, we took the proactive step of temporarily restricting access to cPanel, WHM and Webmail. This “closed the door” while we waited for the official software patch to be finalized.

Once the patch was released that afternoon, our team tested and deployed it across our entire network immediately—finishing the work many hours before standard nightly maintenance would have even begun.

By the time cPanel’s official email alert reached most server owners the following day, the digital landscape was already seeing a massive spike in exploit attempts. We are pleased to report that because of our team’s early intervention, Varial Hosting servers were fully secured before these global attacks even began.

Protecting Server Integrity Against the “Copy Fail” Threat

The very next day, Wednesday, April 29th, a second global threat emerged.

A vulnerability nicknamed “Copy Fail” (CVE-2026-31431) was discovered, affecting almost all Linux-based systems worldwide. This flaw could allow a low-level user to “escalate” their permissions to gain total control of a server.

Because the primary risk involved secure shell (SSH) access, we took the immediate precaution of temporarily disabling customer SSH and implementing early defenses while waiting for an official fix from our OS vendors.

When it became clear that a final patch would take some time to arrive, we decided not to wait. We implemented a “kernel-level” mitigation—a deep-system fix that required a full server reboot to activate.

Prioritizing Security Over Uptime

While we take pride in our ability to perform “rebootless” updates (some of our servers hadn’t needed a restart in over two years!), the emerging risk was too high to ignore. Security experts warned that hackers might try to use outdated or compromised WordPress sites as a “back door” to trigger this exploit. To ensure your data remained 100% isolated and secure, we performed a controlled reboot across our fleet last night.

As of this morning, we are happy to confirm that all servers are now running the fully patched kernel, and this vulnerability is closed.

Our Commitment to Your Security

At Varial Hosting, we know that you count on us to manage the complex world of server security so you don’t have to. While “0-day” threats like these make headlines, they are a routine part of our workday. Our team remains vigilant, monitoring global threat feeds 24/7 and testing patches before they are even officially announced to the general public.

We take these proactive steps to ensure that your business remains online and your data remains private, without you ever having to lift a finger.

Questions?

If you have any questions about these updates or our security protocols, our support team is always here to help. Feel free to open a support ticket or reach out to us directly.

In an industry dominated by giant, faceless conglomerates, we’ve managed to stay a boutique, independent provider for over two decades. We know our customers, and that is something I take a lot of pride in.

Today, I’m writing to you with a challenge we’ve set for ourselves: to double the size of our business over the next five years.

I want to be transparent with you about why. Like many of you, we’ve seen our operating expenses climb rapidly—from server hardware to the software licensing required to keep your sites secure. Combined with a tighter economy, this led us to increase prices earlier this year. It is something I want to avoid doing again at all costs.

Our plan is simple: Instead of just charging more, we are going to grow. We are refreshing our website, expanding our marketing and launching new services to keep our core hosting prices stable for everyone.

But first, let’s have a conversation.

It’s been over ten years since we sent out a customer survey. I actually started creating a new one last week, but then I realized: I hate filling those things out. So, let’s just talk.

I’d love to hear how we are doing. Is there something we’re doing really well that you’d like to see more of? On the flip side, is there a “bug” or a service you wish we offered that would make your life easier? Whether it’s a success story or a frustration you haven’t gotten around to telling us about, I want to hear it. If you have feedback, please reach out to me directly. I read every single message personally.

Coming Soon: WordPress Care (Total Peace of Mind)

We are preparing to launch a WordPress Care & Maintenance Plan designed for those who get stressed out performing updates in fear of breaking their website. We want to become your personal webmaster. The plan includes:

• 24/7 Monitoring: We don’t just check if your server is up; we monitor to ensure your pages are actually rendering correctly for your visitors.
• Human-Reviewed Updates: We don’t just click ‘update’—we personally review and test updates for your WordPress core, themes and plugins to ensure total compatibility.
• Staging Environments: We test all updates in a sandbox environment before pushing them to your live production site.
• Performance & PHP Management: We handle PHP upgrades and server-level caching configuration to keep your site fast.
• 30 Minutes of “Small Tasks”: Every month, you get 30 minutes of our time for those quick site changes or fixes you need.

Want early access? If you’d like to add this plan before our public launch, let me know and I’ll send you the details.

We are also looking for your “vote” on a few other ideas:

• Redis Object Caching: Want a faster WordPress site? We’re considering adding Redis to our Turbo and Max plans. It stores database queries in the server’s RAM for near-instant delivery—making your site feel significantly snappier.
• Node.js Hosting: Are you a developer or “vibe coder” needing a high-performance, Canadian home for your apps?
• Fully Managed VPS: Are you hitting the limits of our Max or XL plans and need more computing power, but with the same managed feature set you already trust?

If any of these would make your life easier, please send me your thoughts.

A Small Favour to Help Us Grow

If you’ve been happy with us over the last 23 years, there are three quick ways you can help us reach our 5-year goal:

• Testimonials: We are refreshing our website and would love to feature you. Shorter is better! We’ll include a link back to your site, which provides a nice SEO boost for your business.
• Google Reviews: Have a spare minute? Leave us a rating or review here.
• Referrals: Our Affiliate Program pays a 10% recurring commission for the life of the account. We have many clients who actually cover their own hosting costs just through a few referrals.

Thank you for being part of the Varial Hosting story for the last two decades. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Ryan Smith
CEO, Varial Hosting

If your business or organization would like to submit payment by EFT, please contact billing@varialhosting.com to request our EFT payment instructions.

Thank you for being part of our family and selecting Varial Hosting as your independent hosting provider.

If you are new to our company or have been a customer with us from the start, we value you and greatly appreciate your support of our business, your phone calls and emails that help us get to know you, your referrals and recommendations, and having the ability to watch your websites come to life.

When we first started 22 years ago there were many companies like us. Small, local hosting providers that offered very personal service. Few companies like us exist any more. The hosting providers we modelled ourselves after in our early years have all been bought up by large investment firms, owned by billionaires seeking to control the market. This centralization has led to an Internet that is now owned and controlled by only a handful of massive corporations.

We are a family owned and operated business that are committed to providing personal service. Our 24/7 support ticket response time average for 2025 was just 20 minutes!

2025 also saw our best server stability ever. All of our servers achieved >99.99% uptime including scheduled maintenance with some servers even having 100% uptime. This is thanks large in part due to our large investment in new server hardware last year and improvements made in the stability of our software stack.

AI was a hot topic in our workplace this year.

No we aren’t trading in our human support experts for AI agents.

AI and machine learning have played a large part in securing our servers for years. They help to train our firewalls to recognize and block attacks, even before reaching your website.

While WordPress is still our customer’s top choice for a website development platform, our Sitejet Builder is emerging as a great alternative for clients looking to create a simple website themselves. With the launch of its new AI website generator, with just your company name, business type, and a short description about your company, Sitejet can instantly generate a beautiful, responsive website for you with content and page structures best suited to your business.

AI has also been a real nuisance this year.

AI scrapers have begun aggressively visiting websites, often overwhelming them with traffic to scrape website contents as quickly as possible. While search engine bots will adhere to rules on how quickly to browse pages and what content they should not access, many AI scrapers do not play nice. In fact some AI scraper bots act more like attackers, hiding their identities to look like real visitors, and using botnets and proxy networks to connect from thousands of locations all at once to make blocking them extremely difficult.

This is a challenge that we and the entire hosting industry are working to find solutions for.

Thank you for another amazing year! If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions for our company, we would love to hear from you.

Wishing you all the best in 2026!

Sincerely,

Ryan Smith, CEO
Varial Hosting

Our Black Friday sale is here and you can save 75% on all of our web hosting plans.

From our easy to use AI website builder to our optimized hosting for WordPress, don’t miss this opportunity to build a website at an unbelievable rate.

Shop our Black Friday sale!

* All advertised prices above apply to prepaid purchases оf a 12-month hosting plan. Special prices are applicable for the first invoice. For all subsequent renewals regular prices apply. Black Friday sale available until December 1, 2025.

Starting January 2026, Gmail will discontinue the fetching of email from 3rd party email accounts using POP fetching. This feature is referred to as “Check mail from other accounts” in your Gmail account settings.

Once Gmail has discontinued this feature they will no longer fetch email from your email accounts hosted by us if you were using this feature.

To work around this you can either:

1. Create an Email Forwarder in cPanel to forward email sent to your email accounts hosted by us to your @gmail.com address.

or

2. Use our Webmail or any IMAP email application like Outlook or Apple Mail to check your email accounts that are hosted by us.

Save up to $480 on your first year of hosting!

Order our Startup, Plus, Turbo or Max hosting plans on an annual billing term and get 67% off your first year!

Order Now!

Save up to $480 on your first year of hosting!

Order our Startup, Plus, Turbo or Max hosting plans on an annual billing term and get 67% off your first year!

Order Now!

PHP 8 builds upon the great improvements brought forward in PHP 7 and introduces several new features for developers which you can read about at: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration84.php

To change your PHP version, simply log into your cPanel and follow this guide:
https://my.varialhosting.com/knowledgebase/98/How-do-I-change-PHP-versions.html

Please be aware that not all web applications and PHP extensions are compatible with PHP 8.4 at this time. For best compatibility we recommend using PHP 8.3 until development of PHP 8.4 matures.