It becomes obvious that most hosting companies today support by default PHP4, only some of them offering PHP5 as an option. Of course for dedicated hosting you can install what you want, but we are talking about the big majority of hosting accounts which are mainly shared. Even that PHP4 is still widely adopted, it’s obvious that the future is in PHP5 not only for its more advanced object oriented support, but also for the possibility to use modern frameworks such Zend Framework. The new solutions that came with PHP5 are definitely much better, faster in development at least, and with highest code quality.
PHP5 applications will be definitely the applications of the future, that’s why it’s more interesting for hosting companies to adopt PHP5 in their hosting plans. From a marketing side, PHP5 users mean new users and new applications and this is interesting because newly written application in PHP5 will find its way slowly, then grow up depending on the business that it was designed for. So here we’ll have three important points: Adopting today the technology of the future, Make it available easily for current users to switch and finally you are not creating anything new, you are simply offering a feature which is PHP5 for powerusers.