Shared hosting servers: moving to PHP 7.1 minimum

As you may know, PHP 5.6 has been obsolete since 31 December 2018, as PHP security support for this version has ended. The minimum version to use at present is PHP 7.1, as we explained in a previous article.

We want our customers to have the best possible experience, and we believe this means using an up-to-date version of PHP. That is why you can update the PHP version used by your hosting at any time from your Plesk control panel, where the latest version of PHP (PHP 7.3) has been available since its release.

As we care about the performance and security of our customers' websites, we want to prevent users from running their sites on obsolete PHP versions, which are slower and make poorly maintained sites less secure.

We are therefore updating the PHP versions of all websites on our shared hosting servers.

• When the server hosting your website is due to be updated, a warning e-mail will be sent to your contact e-mail address at least 48 hours before the change.
• Websites using PHP 7.0 or earlier will automatically be moved to PHP 7.1, and those running WordPress will be moved to PHP 7.3.

We would like to stress that maintaining and updating your website's scripts so that they are compatible with currently supported PHP versions is a basic matter of security.

If necessary, we can switch websites that are incompatible with PHP 7.1 or later back to an earlier PHP version while you update your scripts. However, we want to end this backward compatibility as soon as possible, so we encourage you to act quickly to support an up-to-date version of PHP.

Our technical team is available to answer any questions you may have on this subject, via support ticket or by phone.