Awhile ago the PHP Development Team announced that PHP 4 will no longer be supported as of January 2008. They may release security fixes for PHP 4 but only up until August 2008. After that it is suggested you should not be using PHP 4 and be upgraded to PHP 5.

 How do I know if my site is using PHP?

If you view your site files and you have any files with .php then you are using PHP.

So how does this effect me?

If your site is currently using PHP on any of our servers then most likely you are using PHP 4. All of our newer servers have been setup to run both PHP 4 and PHP 5. We did foresee the end of PHP 4 and have been offering both PHP 4 and 5 on our servers since February 2006.

Now that you know that PHP 4 is going to be gone in the coming months I suggest testing your site with PHP 5. To do that you would do the following:

1. Copy your current site to a /test folder inside your public_html.
2. Create a file called .htaccess in the test folder
3. Place the following code in the .htaccess file…

   AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

4. Now point  your browser to your site with the /test on the end to see how your site reacts with PHP 5.

If you see errors and your site was created by a 3rd party company then you should visit their site to see if they have a version for PHP 5. If they do not to you should contact them to find out when they will have one. If the script is your own or developed by your web designer then you should let them know that your script does not work with PHP 5.

With most sites PHP 5 will not cause any issues but it is better to know today then to wait.

Will new servers only have PHP 5 on them?

Yes as of January 2008 all new servers will have only PHP 5 running on them. With older servers we will phase out PHP 4 on a server by server basis. We will notify everyone on the server of the change giving them lots of notice. The old server updates will begin in January of 2008.