The topic has most often come up in discussions involving the use of the long DEPRECATED mysql_ functions, Many members believe they still “have time”.
But do they? And if so, how much time?
As a coder I have so far only looked at PHP 7 from the perspective of coding and what version 7 would mean to me.-
(what code will I need to change, what new features can I use)
But how about from a hosts perspective? One thing I’ve learned in life is that “Money Talks” so if this is more than fictitious hype I think the move may happen sooner than some think it will.
explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption
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up to 2x faster performance and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6, allowing you to serve more concurrent users without adding any hardware
From
(not an accessibility “best practice” page so please forgive the transcription typo’s )
“Up to 3x Magento transactions on the same hardware”
“Drupal 8 runs 72% faster”
“WordPress on 5.6 uses 100M CPU instructions, PHP 7 only 25M”
I hope any reputable host will give their users adequate notice of a planned upgrade, but I have a strong feeling the change will happen sooner rather than later.
Well, I’d say the hosting companies would be very interested in upgrading, because it means they would need less hardware for the same number of customers. Or looking at it a bit differently, with PHP7 the hosting companies can jam even more customers onto the same hardware and thus, get more income from that hardware. Either way, PHP7 is going to increase margins or cause prices to fall further. All depends on what the market in general does. But for sure, the move to PHP7 should be a no-brainer, if they are only interested in their own interests.
5.8 has Security Support Until 3 Dec 2018. I wouldn’t expect to see PHP7 being rolled out by most until then/just after (no joke)…
Hardware is cheap. The cost/pains of migrating to a New version of PHP when there are known bugs and missing extensions as well as supporting 1000’s of sites with code written 10+ years ago wouldn’t appeal to most.
Most shared hosting enviroments are virtualized there is no guarentee that the provisioning software they are using supports it/or if they are licenced for it (not sure about CPanel lics but there is a cost is there not).
It would make more sense to leave clients where they are and then start to roll out PHP7 to new clients only.
There is no such thing as 5.8 (I assume that is a typo)
It does appear that in the last couple of weeks that PHP 5.6 active support has been extended from July to December and security support from July 17 to December 18. The support page now states:
Version specific notes
PHP 5.6
As it is the final PHP 5 release, support for PHP 5.6 has been extended: active support will run for an additional four months, and the security fix period has been doubled from one to two years. Other releases are unaffected.
Seems likely. Instead of having to buy new servers for their shared hosting they can upgrade a server to PHP 7, fit 50% more accounts on that server and still advertise it as running a lot faster than before.
I would wager a hefty amount that there are more production 5.3 and 5.4 servers out there than 5.5+. I think most providers are waiting for 7 but aren’t just going to up and change. They will offer 7 but not just migrate to 7 as that is a significant change.
There probably are and will be - right up until someone finds a way to exploit a security hole in them - with the added benefit that security patch support for 5.4 ended a few months ago and so whatever hole they find will never get patched.
Anyone whose host doesn’t provide versions more recent than 5.4 should consider moving hosts as their current PHP version will never be updated again regardless of what security issues get found in it. Even 5.5 only has a few months to run before it will be in the same situation.
PHP 5.6 is really the minimum people should be looking for when looking for new hosting.
What are they waiting for? It has been out for nearly two months already.
Another significant difference with 7 is that there is little difference between what works in 5.6 and in 7 (apart from a few long deprecated functions being removed) and a HUGE speed increase. So there is a big benefit to the hosting provider for installing 7 that didn’t apply to earlier versions.
PHP 7 reaches end of normal support in December next year and then one more year for security fixes. As of 3rd Dec 2018 PHP 7 will be officially dead. It would be ridiculous with a normal support life of 2 years that they would expect it to take one year just to get it working right. They have already spent several years on getting it to work right BEFORE they released it.
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