We have deployed new versions of PHP on all our web hosting servers, especially PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6.
This week we brought hot news with our web hosting NoLimit, which is the deployment of new versions of PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6. This update is available on all our servers, for all services – both new and existing. If you want to switch to the new version, just make a quick change in the service settings in the customer administration (detailed in the knowledge base).
We currently offer PHP in the following versions:
For new services, the version can be selected in the order form.
What is different
The new versions are installed in almost identical form to the previous ones. The only major change is the use of the very fast and powerful Zend OPcache as an opcode cache. for caching precompiled PHP scripts. Since version 5.5, OPcache is a direct part of PHP and offers a very significant speedup when executing PHP scripts repeatedly. According to our tests, OPcache is noticeably faster than XCache, which we use for PHP 5.3 and 5.4.
On the PHP side, in version 5.5 the functions of the original MySQL API (mysql_* function) were marked as obsolete, and there were several minor changes, including several backwards incompatible ones – more details on the PHP website – http://cz2.php.net/migration56.
Old versions
The development of new versions of PHP is always moving forward, which also makes older versions obsolete. PHP version 5.3’s life cycle ended in August 2014. Since then, there are no more security updates for PHP 5.3. PHP 5.4 is also no longer in active development, but security updates will continue to be released until September 2015. See the details at php.net.
For our part, we will continue to support the old versions, as there will be many sites that will not find it easy to upgrade to a newer version. However, we recommend everyone to abandon outdated versions (especially PHP 5.3) and use one of the new ones. This is partly because of the higher performance, but mainly because of the end of development of older versions and the associated risk of unpatched security vulnerabilities.
For our part, we will of course ensure that PHP (and other software used) is updated to the latest available version, especially in the event of serious security holes.
What’s next?
In the next few weeks we plan to deploy a new version of Apache 2.4 (we are currently using 2.2). Everything is ready and tested, all that is left is the final tweaking and installation on the servers. At the same time, we are preparing further modifications to increase the performance and stability of servers under load and especially in the case of attacks on the application layer.