PHP 7 for everyone: we did it!

In late April, we announced the start of the transition to PHP 7 (for all customers who had not yet selected a recent PHP version for their hosting). The aim: to drastically improve both the security and the performance of their websites.

At the end of June, after two months of hard work, we completed our campaign to upgrade shared hosting accounts to PHP 7!

The upgrade was rolled out gradually over two months. Although we could have switched every website to PHP 7.3 in a matter of minutes, spreading it out was necessary to provide the high level of support, advice and attention our customers are used to, and which this transition required to go as smoothly as possible.
We took the time to explain, case by case, to every customer who asked about the 500 error that had appeared on their website or about PHP 7, the ins and outs of this change and the solutions to put in place.

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: our customers receive individual follow-up and therefore fully understand the reasons for this upgrade. What is more, they benefit from temporary solutions so that their website keeps working if it is not yet up to date and PHP 7-compatible.

We did in fact switch a number of websites back to PHP 5 to give a little leeway to webmasters and owners of websites requiring significant maintenance.
This poses no technical problem for us, as the servers currently support everything from the very old PHP 5.2 to the latest PHP 7.3. Nevertheless, these obsolete versions, which no longer receive security support, should be avoided. Besides, support for older versions will not last forever, and PHP 5, like PHP 4 before it, will gradually disappear…

As a reminder, we consider that a website faces a significant security risk after 3 months without updates, and a critical risk after 6 months without maintenance.

The outcome

We were able to raise awareness among all our shared hosting customers, in the best possible conditions, of the importance of keeping their scripts up to date and compatible with the latest PHP versions.

No final end date for PHP 5 has been set yet, but its use should now continue to decline gradually until it reaches 0%.

The vast majority of websites on our shared servers now run on PHP 7. Websites run better, and the servers respond even faster than before thanks to the optimisations in PHP 7.

The HaiSoft technical team is delighted with this success!

Now that your website is up to date, perhaps the next step is to switch to HTTPS?

HaiSoft offers a plan that includes updates, personalised advice and security hardening for your WordPress website. It is useful alongside a webmaster, or if you do not have one. We also offer an HTTPS migration service. Feel free to contact our sales team for more information.