In keeping with our commitment to promoting modern technologies, we have updated the default version of PHP used for new web hosting accounts from PHP 7.1 to 7.2. All customers can continue to request a different PHP version (from 5.2 up to the latest available, 7.2) to suit their requirements. (The release of PHP 7.3 is expected later this year; the first alpha is now available).
We have also moved all customers who were using PHP 7.1 to use PHP 7.2, because there are very few incompatible changes in PHP 7.2 and it is very unlikely that you will have code that will be affected by them. We are monitoring our error logs so that if we do detect any such changes, we can move any affected sites swiftly back.
A number of customers continue to run their websites on PHP 5.6, due to using out-of-date code that is not compatible with PHP 7.0+. If you’ve not looked at your website for a while, then now is a great time to do so! PHP 7 has considerable speed improvements over the PHP 5 series, and running out-of-date, unmaintained code is not a good idea from a security point of view. If you want to hire Simba Hosting to look at out-of-date or abandoned code on your PHP-based website, then just give us a shout and we’ll be happy to talk!