PHP 5 will be removed September 1!

News and Announcements
1

In the near future, all versions of PHP 5, including PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6 will be removed from free hosting.

What will happen

Some time in the near future, PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 will be removed from the available PHP versions on free hosting. When that happens, all sites currently using any PHP 5 version will be automatically moved to PHP 7.4 or later.

When will this happen

PHP 5 is scheduled to be removed around September 1st.

You should take action as soon as possible to prevent unnecessary interruptions to your website.

Why are you doing this

The newest version of PHP 5.6 has not received any official updates since December 2018. For PHP 5.5 and 5.4, this is even longer ago.

Since then, various security vulnerabilities have been identified in PHP 5, and we have had to disable various core PHP functions to mitigate these vulnerabilities.

Almost all scripts that are still being maintained have been updated to support PHP 7 since it came out in 2015. Any script that has not been updated five and a half years later is most likely abandoned.

To keep all sites on our servers safe (not just the sites running PHP 5, but also other sites on the servers that may be affected by vulnerabilities), we have chosen to end support for these outdated PHP versions and the scripts that rely on it.

What should I do

The first thing you should do is to verify that all your sites are running on PHP 7.4. To do this, login to the control panel, go to Select PHP Version and check the selected PHP version for every domain name.

If you find any sites not running on PHP 7.4, you can try switching them to PHP 7.4. If you use a popular CMS, most likely it will work without any problems.

If you do experience issues, you should check if the script you’re using has updates available that support PHP 7. If so, you should upgrade your site to the latest version of the software to make it work with PHP 7.

If your software cannot be updated to PHP 7, that means the software is most likely abandoned by the author(s). If so, you should migrate to different software that is still being developed to make sure that your website works and will keep working with current and future system updates.

What can I do if I want to keep using PHP 5

If for some reason you really can’t or won’t upgrade to PHP 7, know that older versions of PHP will remain available on premium hosting. Premium hosting comes with HardenedPHP, that makes it possible to provide older PHP versions in a safe way. Premium hosting supports most minor versions of PHP 5, and even PHP 4.4 if required.

5 Likes
3

Aw man, this means I can’t use old software anymore :frowning:

2 Likes
4

Better, it is risky to use old softwares which aren’t even developed in years.

2 Likes
5

Some old software is useful.

6

But is full of security vulnerabilities. If you really need to use them, you can just upgrade to premium hosting where older versions of PHP are still supported.

2 Likes
7

Better improve and upgrade it to match the newer version, I don’t see why you would pay money just to come up with security vulnerabilities.

4 Likes
8

Does this mean that newer versions of PHP will be available in the future for free hosting?

Also why is the PHP info hidden from the Vista Panel? Was there a problem with it?

9

Exactly. Old, unmaintained software tends to be full of bugs, some of which can be quite dangerous. Because while the software maintainer may have moved on to greener pastures, people looking for security vulnerabilities do not.

If the software is still useful, it should be updated to work on up to date PHP versions.

I’m well aware that this is rarely easy. Either updating the outdated software, or switching to different software, is hard and painful. But almost always it’s also inevitable.

Having it available on premium hosting literally buys you some time. But the intent should be to reduce the time pressure to switch to a supported product, not to keep using it until the end of time.

As far as I know, the plan moving forward is to support only one PHP version on free hosting, which is a recent and maintained PHP version. Right now, this is PHP 7.4, but that will be replaced with PHP 8.0 or later when it’s needed.

I believe it showed some general PHP information instead of the specific PHP configuration on your website. But it was a long time ago, so I don’t remember exactly.

2 Likes
10

You can still access it here:
https://cpanel.epizy.com/panel/modules-new/phpconfig/phpinfo.php

IF just uses some code to hide the buttons, but they’re still accessible

1 Like
11

Hey, add php 8 please :o)

1 Like
12

Would be nice but please read Admin’s reply to me:

So that would mean no PHP8 until PHP7 isnt supported anymore.

If PHP 8 is required for you, upgrade to premium, they have all versions even earlier ones

1 Like
13

php 7.4 will soon be unsupported, so i just wanted to know their plans on it

14

iFastNet wasn’t very clear on this part.

I have personally advocated for supporting only one PHP version on free hosting (and regularly updating that) and make PHP version selection a premium only feature. iFastNet would seem to also lean in that direction, considering that with the last upgraded they decided to replace PHP 7.0 with 7.4, instead of adding it as an additional option (and adding the versions in between).

And in my experience, most scripts are either stuck in PHP 5 because they use horribly obsolete features which have been deprecated for years before and were removed with PHP 7.0 (like the mysql_* functions).

As for the question itself: PHP 8 will be available at some point. When that will be, or whether it will be available as an option or replace PHP 7.4, that I can’t say.

7.4 gets feature support until November and security support for another year after that. We’re still good for a while.

And if you think one and a half years is “soon”, then know that PHP 8.0 is only supported for another two and a half years.

2 Likes
15

I think it is actually quite harsh. It would be more philanthropic to support 2 versions (older and newer ones) to migrate without nerves. As major versions could have incompatible changes.

1 Like
16

Please do remember that this is free website hosting, not a enterprise development platform.

Most PHP setups only come with one PHP version. Most operating system package managers only have one PHP version. Even many control panels, including plain cPanel up to a few years ago, only support the PHP version that is provided by the operating system. As such, many hosting providers don’t provide multiple PHP versions either.

So having multiple PHP version to choose from is a great luxury, and not something that’s a given with any hosting environment.

And in my experience, as long as you keep your code updated and removed deprecated code, you can usually upgrade without any impact. The client area was originally built on PHP 5.4 or 5.5 I think, is currently running PHP 7.4 and is fully compatible with PHP 8.0 save for one piece of external code that still enforces PHP 7. I have never had any issues with a PHP upgrade. And as long as you keep your code updated, you can just upgrade without any issues.

Looking at the upgrade guide for PHP 8.0, the list of incompatible changes is quite long: PHP: Backward Incompatible Changes - Manual But at the same time, I cannot find anything that wouldn’t have been considered bad code with PHP 7. So even with a major version, as long as you wrote code that conforms to best practices, you can upgrade without any code changes.

3 Likes
17

Well, i hope they someday will make a major change that will be incompatible with previous versions, but will make php more elegant and “better designed” :o)

18

I hope not. They did that with Python moving from version 2 to 3. They had to support both the new and old version for 15 years and even then many projects were not moved over yet.

The annual release schedule with incremental changes that PHP has makes it a lot easier to do upgrades.

4 Likes
19

I think this can limit users to run other software, BUT this will add more security to sites

20

The title says September 1 so these should be changed: