5 March 2008
PHP hosting
Posted by Dan under: technical; web development .
As I write this, PHP version 6 is on it’s way to being finalised, which promises improved naming conventions, fixes and new features like namespaces. A lot of this sounds encouraging for the development and future of the language and yet the vast majority of hosts (certainly in the UK) still only support version 4.
I recently had need to find a host for a client, so after visiting TopHosts I called round most of the top 25 to find out if it met the prerequisites of the system we’d made using PHP5 and MySQL5. There only seemed to be a handful that had upgraded and one that was to upgrade soon.
For many developers, there are only a few things that might need to be changed in going from version 4 to 5 so why hasn’t it been done?
Is it a financial reason? Is it because for many hosts, their clients aren’t professionals and so might not be able to amend their code?
PHP5 has been solid for years and yet most hosting companies don’t support it so how long could it be until the improvements brought by version 6 are commonly available?
One Comment so far...
Phil Thompson Says:
6 March 2008 at 12:56 pm.
It is a nightmare finding a UK host that is both cheap and PHP5 enabled.
I imagine the reason is financial. If they switch to PHP5 the chances are 1000s of websites *could* break overnight.
I know 1and1 allow you to switch into PHP5 mode via a line in your .htaccess
