PHP ( created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf ) is one of the most popular and widely used server-side web programming languages.
PHP It is the language on which over 80% of the websites on the Internet are based.
If you need to use old PHP versions to keep running your sites or applications we can do it. Go ahead with the short reading.
The PHP language is so versatile that you have embedded a PHP code in the HTML code or you have used it in combination with various web template systems, web content management systems and web frameworks, not to mention WordPress applications, more or less famous CMS that you will surely know.
This ease of use and the low barrier to entry make it ideal as an extensible platform used by companies, organizations, companies.
As a publishing set, each PHP branch is designed to be fully supported for two years from its initial stable release.
During this time, the bugs and security issues that have been reported are fixed and released in regular timely releases.
But once this two-year period of active support has elapsed, the branch is ONLY supported for an additional year for critical security issues.
What happens next is that it will reach what is called EOL (End of Life), which means that the version will no longer receive maintenance, troubleshooting or other support.
For most companies and businesses, the fact that these three versions (PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1) both reached the end of their lifecycle in December 2018 was a cause for serious concern.
If you are still using older versions of PHP, it means that your website or app is still using functions with outdated PHP configurations to work.
This undeniably opens your website and application that depend on those versions to vulnerability and exploitation.
Such a website will then become a toy for malicious hackers.
The fact that this happens every day hasn't stopped many businesses, government agencies, start-ups, e-commerce portals and web agencies with perhaps hundreds of sites from running on unsupported PHP versions.
Often the reason lies in the significant cost of retrofitting the source code and the risk of breaking things that could result from the upgrade process.
For example, it can happen as it happened to one of our esteemed customers, who in the acquisition phase of a well-known online magazine, based on WordPress 3.5 customized at Core and module level, you need to do the onboarding of the project on its own server, set up a staging server and start migrating to WordPress 6.0.
The process was not trivial, considering the adaptation of custom plugins and changes in the core that had to be outsourced, with a development work that still took about 6 months, a period in which we provided Hosting on PHP 5.3 and all the support systems to the developer, both in terms of hosting, security, hardening and setting up the new staging.
If you are in a situation where if you need to host older versions of PHP, we have a perfect solution for you in the form of a service called Harden PHP hosting that offers the same solid protection as supported PHP versions.
Not only Harden PHP protects your old PHP versions (5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4) with ionCube Loaders, PHP extensions required by each of these old versions, but you can also take advantage of selecting the PHP version you want each of the websites to run.
It takes a few minutes to start working and our team, always on 24/24 to make sure you never encounter any problems, will also migrate the entire website from the old server to our new hosting.
Hosting of old versions of PHP
Although we risk being repetitive, it is good to specify that our Hosting service is able to provide hosting of the main obsolete versions of PHP in an isolated and protected environment with appropriate Backup and monitoring procedures in order to have a system that is always as secure as possible.
Specifically we provide Hosting with the following PHP versions:
- PHP 5.2 hosting
- PHP 5.3 hosting
- PHP 5.4 hosting
- PHP 5.5 hosting
- PHP 5.6 hosting
- PHP 7.0 hosting
- PHP 7.1 hosting
- PHP 7.2 hosting
- PHP 7.3 hosting
The old versions from 5.2 to 5.5 are run in separate mode through sandbox, VPS, Cloud Instances and in any case with separation of privileges. Dangerous functions are disabled if they are not needed, such as system (). the exec (), and functions that could compromise the system at the execution level.
If it is possible to limit access at the Geographic level of machines and websites exposed on the network publicly, we can decide to carry out a filtering at the geographic level by enabling only trusted countries and disabling the others.
Feel free to contact us if you need this hosting service for older versions of PHP.
We recommend that you send us an email to info@managedserver.it specifying what type of application or CMS you are using (or perhaps a proprietary custom application), which version of PHP, and any additional disk space and / or resources so that you can tailor the service well to your needs.
