Per our previous announcement in December 2018, the developers of PHP (The PHP Group) ended support for some of the deprecated versions of PHP. For some versions of PHP, only security fixes to address known vulnerabilities have been made available while older versions of PHP have reached their End-of-Life meaning no further security fixes will be made available.
PHP 5.6 and 7.0 end of life was reached at the end of 2018 while PHP 7.1 was in late 2019.
Since 2018, the BEZA security team have maintained all security fixes and patches for the above deprecated versions of PHP (ie PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1). During these past couple of years, the BEZA security services team have offered our customers assistance to update and test their web application(s) utilizing the newer releases of PHP (like PHP 7.2 thru PHP 7.4).
The good news is almost all of our customers have upgraded their web applications to support the latest versions of PHP releases.
As such we will be deactivating all end-of-life versions of PHP effective October 01, 2020. This will include PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1. Customers who are still utilizing these deprecated versions of PHP will automatically get switched to use the stable supported version of PHP 7.3.x.
PHP Community Supported Versions
| Active Support | PHP 7.4 PHP 7.3 |
A release that is being actively supported. Reported bugs and security issues are fixed and regular point releases are made. |
| Security Fixes only | PHP 7.2 | A release that is supported for critical security issues only. Releases are only made on an as-needed basis. |
| End of Life | PHP 7.1 PHP 7.0 PHP 5.6 |
A release that is no longer supported. Users of this release should upgrade as soon as possible, as they may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. |
So why is this important?
If you operate a website, then it’s critically important to know what version of php is running on your website. Once the php community stops releasing security updates, any website still operating a non-supported version is vulnerable to data breach and malicious attacks by hackers.
Besides all the security benefits, PHP 7.4 is also the better choice in terms of performance. Especially with Content Management Systems like WordPress, which gains a noticeable increase in performance.
What can be done?
BEZA customers can check their hosting control panel to see what version of php is running on their website (see image below):
We recommend all customers use the latest version of 7.4.x.
To take advantage of php 7.4.x, your php web application(s) must be compatible w/ php 7.4.
If your web application was developed by our professional team of web developers, then it’s 100% fully compatible with php 7.4.x since January 2019.
If you have created a PHP application(s) manually or through a 3rd party, the official migration guides from PHP might be helpful:
Switch to latest PHP version Today!
We’ve made it very easy for our hosting customers to switch their website php version. Simply login to the BEZA hosting control panel and choose php 7.3.x or 7.4.x from the list of available php versions. It’s that simple! Just remember, your web application must be compatible to operate properly.
Starting September 2020, the default-PHP-version for any newly created website via the BEZA hosting control panel is PHP 7.4.x.
Generally speaking, all current CMS and web applications should be compatible with PHP 7.3+. In most cases, incompatibility is due to outdated versions of plugins or components and can be resolved easily by updating those to the newest version.
Your account security is one of our top priority. As your web hosting provider, we want to ensure we can continue to secure your websites and hosted applications.
If your web application doesn’t currently support php 7.3, contact our Web Development team to discuss how we can help update your web application(s) to run on the latest secure php version 7.3 or 7.4.
