PHP 5

I hear Geocities has gone forever. Well, it’s hardly surprising, but it is a little sad. I remember signing up for one of their quaintly named sites all those years ago. Still, I went investigating and found Yahoo Web Hosting! (I feel everything with Yahoo! needs exclaiming, it is like some kind of marketing ploy of theirs, right!?)

I was curious to see what kind of features such a major player like Yahoo! would offer in their web hosting, and after a few clicks I found Perl and PHP support. Now before you pull out the party hats and invite your friends over, I mean it has “PHP” support. 4.3.11 to be precise.

This leads me onto a pet hate of mine. The PHP community have been moving ever forward and have hit a great milestone with version 5.3. It’s a great, rapidly maturing language – I use it daily. Hourly, even. Version 5 of PHP has been around for an eternity (in IT years, they’re like dog years you know…) and yet a large subset of the internet web hosting companies STILL INSIST ON USING PHP 4!!! WHY!?

I suggest next time you find a company “offering” you PHP 4, you send them a polite email reminding them version 5 was released in July 2004, and while you appreciate 5 years clearly isn’t long enough for them to evaluate and upgrade, perhaps now is the time to “take the plunge”.

For the record, my Lamped hosting offer 5.3.1.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 08:36 and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “PHP 5”

  1. Marc Says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 08:46

    Additional: I continued looking. The version of PHP Yahoo! are using, was released in March 2005. Even 4.4.9 was released in August 2008 – that would be a start.