PHP 5.3 Hosting Now Available At HostUpon

Generally when a patch or upgrade to PHP is available, we try to install it immediately since there’s usually very good reasons for those patches. Most often, minor patches are either bug-fix releases or security patches. However usually it’s safe to upgrade from one minor version of PHP to another minor version as long as the major version number doesn’t change. For example, going to PHP 5.2 from PHP 4, is a major upgrade.

The reason I mention this is that major version upgrades such as the example above aren’t reverse compatible with each other. You can’t upgrade from 4 to 5 without also upgrading the site script files running on your website.

Now this is a fairly clear-cut example, and technology was actually invented to address this issue – The ability to run both PHP 4 and PHP 5 at the same time – so it wasn’t as big a deal. In fact it was addressed long enough ago that it was never a problem for HostUpon. But what if you wanted to go from the extremely popular and widespread version of PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.3? No big deal right?

Imagine our dismay when we found out that this relatively ‘minor’ version upgrade was not reverse compatible with itself. This meant that we could not upgrade our servers to PHP 5.3 since we have quite a few customers on our servers running scripts that would fail under that version. To make matters worse, that technology I mentioned above to run two different versions of PHP wasn’t designed to be able to tell the difference between PHP 5.2 and 5.3, so we couldn’t set it up to run both of these versions.

But there is some good news.

We set up a completely new server specifically so it could use PHP 5.3 instead of version 5.2. It is otherwise identical in configuration to all our other services so it can run all the same websites if they are compatible with this version of PHP. We have had this server running with a few users who have been interested in it for a few months now, and we’re pretty happy with how it’s been handling itself. PHP 5.3 has been out long enough to all of its major kinks worked out and even most of the minor ones.

At this time, anyone may ask to be moved to a PHP 5.3 service. It doesn’t cost anything extra, and there’s no fee to be moved to this server. All that is required is a ticket submitted to support, or if you’re setting up a new account let our Billing staff know ahead of time that you want 5.3 service for your site.

If you have any questions about this new service, You can contact us by phone, chat, or our ticket system at any time!