PHP 5.3 available for testing

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be making PHP version 5.3.15 available to customers in our account management control panel (and making the 5.3 series the default for all customers several months after that).

We’ve been testing PHP 5.3 ourselves for some time (among other things, it’s been running our Webmail system for several weeks, handling millions of page views without any problems), but it makes sense to test it on a wider variety of sites before deploying it for everyone.

If you would like to help us test PHP 5.3, just contact us and let us know what site(s) you’d like to enable it for. We’ll do that for you (it needs to be done manually by our staff for now).

Testers shouldn’t notice any difference in how their site works after the change, but if you do, let us know immediately so we can restore your site to the original version of PHP while we investigate the problem.

A couple of other notes: If you want to upgrade to PHP 5.3 but you need to be sure it’s fully tested on many other sites first, don’t do anything yet. We’ll make another announcement on our blog when it’s generally available to all customers using our control panel. Finally, we know that some of our customers are interested in the cutting-edge PHP 5.4 series, too; we’re not introducing that yet, but we intend to make it available as an option after we completely remove the old PHP 5.2 series from our servers.