WHMCS Upcoming End-of-Life
Friday, April 8th, 2016 - Updates
WHMCS recently released version 6.3 of their popular WHMCS billing software. I know a lot of our users depend on this software for their web hosting business. I thought now would be a good time to review the end-of-life status for various WHMCS version.
First, a primer. Why is end-of-life important? As software developers work on adding new features and optimizing code for a program, over time the core of that software may need to be replaced. To put it simply, this is what WHMCS 6.3 represents, a new core. Now, developers cannot continue to update cores for various other releases forever. So the amount of time that a software core remains active and able to be updated is called that software’s lifetime. Eventually those softwares reach their end, called their end-of-life. If you use a piece of software that is end-of-life, essentially you are using a version of the software that will never see updates again. This means that major security holes can be disclosed for those versions, and the developers aren’t going to fix it. Depending on end-of-life software puts your account, and potentially your customer’s data at risk.
WHMCS is currently supporting 4 different versions. From a developer’s standpoint, that’s a lot of software cores to keep safe and secure. The oldest of these cores – WHMCS 6.0 – is set to go end of life on July 31, 2016. If you are using WHMCS 6.0 you need to be aware of this and making plans to upgrade to a newer version.
A look at the current (as of April 8, 2016) WHMCS version makeup:
| WHMCS Version 6.0 | 6.0.4 | July 31, 2016 |
| WHMCS Version 6.1 | 6.1.2 | September 31, 2016 |
| WHMCS Version 6.2 | 6.2.2 | December 31, 2016 |
| WHMCS Version 6.3 | 6.3.0 | Unknown |
IMPORTANT NOTE: – If you are using any other version of WHMCS, for example WHMCS version 5.3.14, then you are using an end-of-life version of WHMCS and may be vulnerable to security threats!
To upgrade WHMCS, you may need to contact your license vendor. That would be whoever you purchased your WHMCS license from. You may also find the information on WHMCS’s site to be useful for upgrading.
Matt
AMS Support
