Beginning on December 2, 2024 we will be switching accounts that are currently using PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.2.

Official support for PHP 8.0 ended about a year ago, on November 26, 2023. It is time for this version of PHP to begin being retired. Accounts created within the past 6 months have had their PHP version set to PHP 8.2 by default.

In addition to the phasing out PHP 8.0 we will begin offering PHP 8.3 on our servers. A look at the PHP lifetimes for current and recent PHP versions:

PHP 8.0 – End-of-Life, ended November 26, 2023
PHP 8.1 – ending December 31, 2025
PHP 8.2 – ending December 31, 2026
PHP 8.3 – ending December 31, 2027
PHP 8.4 – ending December 31, 2028

PHP 8.4 is not yet available on our server – it was just released a few days ago. Generally PHP versions go through several minor revisions after being released before they are deemed to be production ready.

Why is this important?
A lot of web hosting service providers will continue to allow end-of-life versions of PHP to be used on their servers. We tend to believe that security is important to our web hosting clients. The issue with using end-of-life versions of PHP is not the PHP version itself, per se. The issue is the scripts that rely on those end-of-life versions of PHP, what we refer to as the low hanging fruit of security and vulnerabilities in the web hosting environment.

A script (or plugin, theme, extension, component, addon, etc) may have been written back in 2021 – during PHP 8.0’s prime. If that script was released in 2021 and then never, ever touched again by its developer – then that script is abandoned. A reputable script is going to be maintained by its developer to keep it efficient and to address any known security holes. A script that is abandoned has no such assurances of being efficient or safe and secure of any known security holes.

By rotating out end-of-life versions of PHP this brings these abandoned scripts to the forefront. By now, any reputable script developer would have updated their code to work with current in-life versions of PHP, since PHP 8.0 went end-of-life on November 26, 2023. If a script has problems handling the update from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.1 or PHP 8.2, then you either do not have the latest version of that script installed or the script has been abandoned by its developers. This is why rotating out end-of-life versions of PHP is important.

Having said all of that, we are not yet fully removing PHP 8.0 from our servers. If you have issues with your website handling the switch to a current in-life version of PHP, we can still temporarily downgrade your account to PHP 8.0. However, you need to be aware that this is only temporary. You need to use this time to resolve the issues with the scripts on your website to bring them up to date.

On January 1, 2025 we will again switch any account that has been downgraded to PHP 8.0 back to a current in-life version of PHP. If the issues with your website’s script still haven’t been resolved then you will need to consider upgrading your web hosting plan to have the account migrated to a server with extended PHP support. Extended PHP support will allow you to run your website on PHP 8.0 while you continue to make efforts to resolve the issues with your website and current in-life versions of PHP.

The purpose of all of this is to continue to provide you safe and secure web hosting environment. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Over the next few weeks we will be performing some updates to Apache and PHP on all of our servers. These updates are necessary to bring our servers in-line with upcoming PHP updates (PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.1). These updates should incur just a few seconds of downtime while services are restarted during the update process.

If you experience any issues after these updates, please open a support ticket so we can investigate and correct any issues.

Again, these updates are necessary so that we can deploy future versions of PHP on our servers. We don’t have an exact timetable for when each server will be updated, but our hope is to conclude all of these updates by the end of September.

Steven
AMS Support

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AMS Sales