PHP 7.4 and friends come to Hostarium

PHP 7.4 and friends come to Hostarium

At Hostarium we strive to provide the latest and greatest technology to our users. That’s why, less than a week after its release, we’re excited to offer PHP 7.4 compatibility for all applications.

PHP 7.4, released on 28th November 2019, is the latest version of the popular PHP programming language (which all our current applications are written in). As always, it provides a decent set of new features, which you can read about on PHP’s website here.

In addition to its new features, PHP 7.4 continues the recent trend of greater performance than its predecessors. Benchmarks indicate performance improvements of up to 15% compared to PHP 7.3 as well as lower memory usage.

Excited as we are providing PHP 7.4, we know that given its newness it may not be compatible with all sites and plugins, so we’re just as excited to announce that you now have the ability to change your PHP version on the fly from within Aqua Panel.

Multiple PHP Versions

It is now possible to choose between three different versions of PHP from within Aqua Panel. The currently supported versions are:

  • PHP 7.2
  • PHP 7.3
  • PHP 7.4

These are all the versions currently supported by PHP, which is an choice we have made to provide the best level of security. This also means we won’t be offering support for any of the PHP 5.x versions.

As with all things at Hostarium, we’ve have tried to make this process as straight-forward as possible, requiring just a few clicks. Simply select the PHP Version option Aqua Panel’s left hand menu under the ‘Advanced Tools’ submenu.

You’ll be presented with a page that shows you what PHP version your site is currently using and have the option to select your desired version from the dropdown menu.

This change will then apply instantly, both on your website and within SSH, if you make use of it.

New sites will continue to deploy with PHP 7.3 until we can be sure of the compatibility across different systems. Existing sites will also retain their current PHP version by default. We made these decisions to avoid breaking changes, but you’re free to change your version right away.

What’s next?

We continue to work to improve Aqua Panel, both by adding new features and improving performance and the user experience. So needless to say we have a lot of new things in the pipeline for early 2020.

One of our primary goals is to make the process of moving to Hostarium as streamlined as possible. So early next year we’ll be introducing new features to make migrating as easy as possible. We can’t wait to show these off to you in the very near future!