Harry Fuecks is talking about Shared Hosts and PHP5 Upgrades at SitePoint. In fact, switching to PHP5 for hosting providers still not the easy task due to backwards compatibility issues, the broken compatibilities from PHP4 to PHP5 made the switch very difficult for hosting providers.
We have the same problem. The backwardscompatibility issues are small, and we could easily fix our own apps. But we also do hosting for several hundreds of websites not created by us. Getting all our customers to fix their sites (and providing them with a means to test) will be hellish.
What strategies can be employed by shared hosts to deal with this problem? Given that there isn’t a magic wand to fix it and many shared hosts have limited manpower, what to do?
The ideas proposed by Harry are pretty interesting, which is to make a clear schedule for migration and communicate it to their customers with warning 3 months before or so. I think there is something better which could be done, which is to make PHP4 and PHP5 coexist on the same server for the migration period, and step by step customers will move to PHP5 while their previous sites still working.
Another alternative is to install PHP5 separately on another server, and customers who are interested to switch could be moved one after the other. But this will cost time and money for the hosting provider, and I don’t see what they could earn by using PHP5 rather than PHP4.
Why PHP5 is better ?
The switch to PHP5 have another strategy behind for hosting providers which is to offer enterprise solutions for their customers and attract more professionals to work with them. In fact, PHP5 have been developped to provide enterprise solution that many applications and frameworks today are developped in that way. Supporting PHP5 is a positive point for Hosting providers which work more with professionals rather than small customers for shared hosting and so on.
Should Shared hosting upgrade to PHP5 ?
In my opinion it’s not time to force upgrading to PHP5, the development of PHP5 is very fast in the last period and you could easily saw a new version in a very short time with features improved, bug fixes … etc. In the same time PHP5 should be used more and more so bugs could be detected and people can give their opinions on the new PHP version powered by the Zend Engine 2.
