Why are we dropping support for PHP 5.3 and not supporting older versions of PHP?

Unfortunately, the PHP developers themselves have discontinued support for older versions of PHP and these versions have become dangerous and a prime target for hacker attacks that can damage your website or our servers. There are no longer security patches for these old versions of PHP and they may also contain bugs that have only been fixed in new versions of PHP. It is therefore in your own interest to prevent problems that may arise and to keep your website up to date and therefore secure.

We plan to discontinue support for PHP 5.3 completely during 2019, followed by the discontinuation of support for 5.6 in later years.

What does this mean for you as a customer?

For Shared Business accounts, this means that you will need to check your site(s) and any PHP scripts on your account for any outdated code references to the old PHP versions that may have been deprecated in the newer versions of PHP. You can view what code functions were deprecated with each PHP version upgrade under the „What has changed“ section below.

In the list of domains in the Administration you can see which domains are running PHP 5.3.

• Check the sites on these domains and ensure possible updates, or close (remove) parts (on subdomains or subfolders) that you no longer use.
• If you are using WordPress or another CMS system, make sure it is up to date. Current versions of almost all of these systems can run on PHP 7.x
• If you've built the site yourself, try switching PHP and fix any errors that may appear.
• If someone else created the site for you, try contacting them to see if it is possible to switch to 5.6 or 7.x, or arrange for them to upgrade their code to make this possible.