PHP 5.2 rebuilt (but please don’t use it any more)
Although we haven’t offered the long-obsolete PHP 5.2 series to new customers for some time, some who signed up long ago are still using it.
(New customers have defaulted to using PHP 5.5 for the last few months, and PHP 5.3 was the default for several years before that. We’ve also previously nagged everyone still using PHP 5.2 by e-mail, asking them to upgrade to at least PHP 5.3.)
For those customers still using PHP 5.2 despite the nagging, this is just a quick note that we’ve “rebuilt” PHP 5.2.17 for technical reasons to allow it to keep running on our systems. It now uses slightly newer versions of various libraries, including libxml, FreeType, ImageMagick, MySQL, and OpenSSL. The rebuilt version will be deployed on all our servers within the next few hours.
These changes should not be noticeable. In the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
All that said, nobody should be using PHP 5.2 any more. It has hundreds of bugs that will never be fixed, and it’s slower than newer versions. If you’re using 5.2, please upgrade to at least 5.3, and preferably 5.5.
First, make sure you’re using the latest available versions of any PHP scripts you’ve installed, then:
- Login to our “My Account” control panel.
- Click PHP Settings.
- Click PHP 5.5 series, then Save Settings.
Then test your site. It will probably work fine, and you’ll be all set for years.
If the 5.5 series doesn’t work, it means the PHP code in a script you’ve installed is incompatible with modern versions of PHP and needs updating. Try the 5.4 or 5.3 series for now; if either of those work, you should fix your scripts, but you’ll have at least a year to do so.
If the 5.3 series doesn’t work, either, your scripts are severely outdated and should be fixed ASAP. You can choose the PHP 5.2 series again to get things working immediately, but that version may be removed from our servers at any time, as we’ve previously announced. You should contact the person who wrote or provided your PHP scripts, and that person should be able to fix this for you.
