We like to give you plenty of advance warning about changes and this may affect some of our website hosting clients in the future. PHP 5.6 comes to the end of life on the 31st December 2018.
After the 31st of December, the software continues to work, but the organisations behind PHP no longer provide support or security fixes. If a vulnerability is found it will not be fixed, this essentially means hackers may try to target websites running on older versions of PHP.
PHP.net is the most popular server-side programming language with 82% market share and by far the fastest growing amongst it’s “competitors” with ASP.net taking only 15% of the market, according to W3Techs.com.
PHP version 5 is used by 97.8% of all websites who use PHP. Because of this wide application usage, PHP is constantly exploited by hackers, making sites vulnerable.
Here is how PHP.net support normally works – for two years, bugs and security issues that have been reported are fixed and are released in regular point releases. After that two year period, each version of PHP is supported for an additional year for critical security issues only. After the version reaches the end of life, it is no longer supported by the community and any vulnerabilities, when discovered, are no longer being fixed.
Currently, versions 5.0 – 5.5 are not supported by the community. This makes up 86% of all PHP 5 sites and 84% of all PHP sites. So, basically, most of the PHP sites are currently not supported by the PHP community.
Typically, unsupported versions present a security problem, and it means it is time to move the sites from unsupported versions, in this latest case PHP 5.6, to later versions. But more often than not, when a version becomes obsolete, website owners are not able to update and change programs to accommodate newer versions quickly to ensure the security of their site.
If you are currently using PHP version 5.6 or older on your Nucleus hosted website, PHP versions 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 are available for you to switch to via your hosting control panel. If you require assistance with making this change please contact us at websupport@nucleus.worldline.ca. Please note that some older coded PHP websites and older versions of WordPress may not work correctly in newer versions of PHP. Nucleus is not responsible for updating your PHP code or WordPress versions to work on supported versions of PHP
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Nucleus Network Operations.
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