We are pleased to let you know that you can now upgrade to PHP 5.4 in your Online Control Panel.
We will be withdrawing support for PHP 4 at the end of September and in order to avoid having to make changes further down the line, you should upgrade to this latest release. The PHP group ended support of PHP 4 in 2008, so we will be removing it from our Shared Hosting Cluster as well as the lifecycle of this software has come to a natural end.
According to w3tech.com, at the moment PHP version 5 is used by 97% of all the websites that use PHP!
There are lots of benefits of PHP 5.4 as you can read below:
Better Security
PHP 5.4 is a “current” version, which means that ‘The PHP Group’ will make security fixes to it, which we can apply to our servers directly from the source.
In addition, in PHP 5.4 many features from the language that were previously used frequently by insecure sites have been removed. Examples of these features include register_globals, magic_quotes and safe mode. Now that these are they are gone completely it means that it is impossible to use exploits based on these features.
Sites will perform faster
PHP 5.4 has a great improvement in speed performance. It is almost 2 times the speed of PHP 5.1 and that was a lot better than previous versions to begin with!
Powerful Language Features
PHP 5.4 brings with it, versus PHP 4, an incredible amount of powerful language features which make development much easier, including:
How do I upgrade to PHP 5.4?
1. Log into your Online Control Panel
2. For each Domain, upgrade PHP Version – this link is found under Scripts & 1-Click Installs. Take a look at this step-by-step guide to learn how to do this.
I’ve heard that PHP 5.5 has been released?
You may be aware that PHP 5.5 was released last week. Please be assured that we are working to include this as an upgrade option in the very near future and will keep you informed.
If you have any questions or concerns about the update then do not hesitate to get in touch, simply raise a support ticket in your Online Control Panel.
