PHP4 Has been discontinued

[Matt]

Happy New year from all of us at GlowHost.com!

This is yet another reminder that PHP4 support has been discontinued by the PHP development team as of Jan 01, 2007.

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

What this means for you is that we will no longer be accepting requests to install or add additional functionality to PHP4. We will continue to run PHP4 for a few more months for those of you who still have not converted your scripts to PHP5 compatibility. We do not yet have a date where GlowHost will no longer support anything running under PHP4 since it is impossible to say how much longer PHP4 will remain stable after the EOL (End Of Life). We will run PHP4 as long as it remains stable, or until security patches are no longer available, whichever is first, but NO LATER than Aug 8th, 2008.

Please assume that support for PHP4 will be dropped by GlowHost entirely by the end of Jan 2008 just to be safe, as we are already seeing stability issues particularly for sites that require Zend Optimizer.

What we suggest that you do now is login to your cPanel and click on "PHP Configuration" You will see an option of which PHP version to use.

Please choose PHP5 and you will be able to test if your scripts will run under PHP5 and you can make the necessary changes to your scripts if any are needed. Most scripts should run fine under PHP5 but a few of you will need to make changes. If you need to roll back to PHP4 temporarily you can do using the "PHP configuration" option in cPanel again.

Please make sure your sites are PHP5 compatible as soon as possible, and that you have configured your cPanel for PHP5.

If you do not have the PHP4 or PHP5 selector, or, do not have the "PHP Configuration" option in your cPanel, please let us know by submitting a ticket to our helpdesk.

If you choose the "System Default" option, your sites will be running under PHP4 (for the time being) and when we change the system default PHP to PHP5, if you have "System Default" checked your site will automatically be rolled over to PHP5. This option is not recommended. We recommend you specify the PHP version for your site, and we recommend that version is PHP5.

If you have any questions on this conversion process, please start a new thread in the General Support forum so that others can benefit from your question and our answers....many people will likely have the same question as you. You can also open a ticket at our helpdesk if you have questions that are specific to your individual account and are not suitable for public conversation.

[bluemilk]

Matt,

I wrote a lot of PHP scripts on the glowhost servers. How do I know if they will all work with the PHP5 compiler? I need to make sure the transition is smooth.

thanks,
Jon Kowalski

[Matt]

Well I pretty much described it above. Choose the option for PHP5 in cPanel > PHP Configuration. Then whatever breaks doesn't work with PHP5

There are other temporary ways to do this like load all the files into a subdirectory or another cpanel account and then use .htaccess to control just that subdirectory or use the seperate cPanel account as a staging server so the live site does not break.

[Alexander]

Hello,
I'm afraid, the only way to check it is to enable PHP5 for this account(s) using the option in your Cpanel, as Matt described in his post.