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PHP 5.3 and web hosting - why so slow to update?

wrldwzrd89

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
I am not exactly happy with my current web host's utter refusal to migrate the PHP5 installations on their web servers to PHP 5.3, now that PHP 5.2 support ended... heck, why PHP4 (which is obsolete now) is the default PHP there is utterly beyond me. I did some research into this, and it seems all web hosting providers are slow to uptake new versions of PHP. This saddens me - anyone know the reasons behind it?

Heck, the same complaint can be leveled at web hosts for MySQL too... version 5.5 is out now, and very few hosts have updated their servers to use it.
 
S

SDub90

macrumors 6502a
Nov 9, 2009
685
3
Long Island
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I run a small web host and our biggest problem with updating is breaking some very popular scripts with the different versions. What we've resorted to is setting up several small virtual servers with different configurations for the occasional customer that needs/wants a different version number. All our servers have PHP4 and either PHP 5.1 or 5.2
 
angelwatt

angelwatt

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
7,852
9
USA
As a note, you may want to check if your host lets you install PHP within your account. My host does so I'm able to install any version of PHP I need and can control the php.ini file. I haven't gotten this route yet as I haven't needed to, but it's certainly something to look into.
 
wrldwzrd89

wrldwzrd89

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 6, 2003
12,110
77
Solon, OH
angelwatt said:
As a note, you may want to check if your host lets you install PHP within your account. My host does so I'm able to install any version of PHP I need and can control the php.ini file. I haven't gotten this route yet as I haven't needed to, but it's certainly something to look into.
Click to expand...
I know for sure that that isn't an option for me... as I have low-end shared hosting, not a VPS or dedicated server. As much as I'd love to upgrade to one of those... they're just too expensive to justify the cost right now.
 
7031

7031

macrumors 6502
Apr 6, 2007
479
0
England
wrldwzrd89 said:
I know for sure that that isn't an option for me... as I have low-end shared hosting, not a VPS or dedicated server. As much as I'd love to upgrade to one of those... they're just too expensive to justify the cost right now.
Click to expand...
Ah yes. There are some pretty cheap VPS companies out there though - hell, my friend found one that does VPS servers for something like $7 a month, but as you would expect, they're oversold as much as physically possible to the point where you're probably better off staying on your current shared hosting. Of course, if it is so important to you to have the latest PHP I'm sure you can find hosts out there which have a more up-to-date version.
 
CANEHDN

CANEHDN

macrumors 6502a
Dec 12, 2005
855
0
Eagle Mountain, UT
If you're on a shared server, they probably won't upgrade. I have my servers through a dedicated server solution (SingleHop). They upgraded my PHP version with no problem. When I upgraded to 5.3.4 my code worked fine.
 
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