At Simba Hosting, we are committed to providing up-to-date technologies to our users. Sadly, this commitment is far from the norm in the web hosting industry. This can be seen by comparing the graph of what PHP versions WordPress websites are running on, with the list of dates on which various PHP versions were end-of-lifed by the PHP group. Over a quarter of WordPress sites run on versions end-of-lifed over two years ago. Only 5.4% currently run on the latest and recommended PHP version (7.2).
As a result of this aim, we no longer have any customers who have websites which require PHP versions 5.2, 5.3 or 5.4. It is also increasingly difficult to run the first of these two on modern operating systems because they have not been updated to keep up. This being so, with immediate effect, we are no longer offering PHP 5.2 or 5.3 in any form. The latter will continue to be available on request to help new customers transitioning from legacy web hosting. If you are in the position of having a site on obsolete technology on a web host somewhere else, do get in touch to see how we can help you!
This has no effect on the default PHP version enabled on new hosting packages, which continues to be the current PHP series, 7.2.
Similarly, in the modern web hosting mass-market, interest in the Perl scripting language is to all purposes non-existent. No customer has requested it on our shared hosting platform for some years, and accordingly, it is no longer offered on our shared hosting platform. Not spending time maintaining unwanted technologies on our platform allows us to have more time to offer technologies that are in demand. (It is still available on customised/private VPS servers if desired).