How to Update the PHP Version of Your Website

Video Transcript

Welcome to miHosting.com. Today we’re going to look at how to change the PHP version within your hosting service. Some questions that come up related to the world of PHP and its versions. What PHP versions are available? How do you know? Which version should you use? Generally, our advice is to use the latest version. Normally, the latest versions are the ones that work best, the ones with the best performance, and the ones with the most features. Right now, as of the date of this video, we have version 5.6, version 7.0, and version 7.1. The ideal approach is to test a program with the versions from top to bottom. If your program doesn’t work on version 7.1, that’s not the version you should use. If you test your program on version 7.1 and see that it fails, then you need to drop down to 7.0 and check whether it works well. Stay on that version. If version 7.0 doesn’t work, you’ll have to drop down to version 5.6. At this point, our recommendation is that if you’re working with a program on 5.6, it would be a good idea to update your program to make it compatible with 7.0. Version 5.6 doesn’t have much life left. Over time, the versions will change, and the lower-numbered versions, like 5.6, are the ones you should try to move away from. In the future, it will be toward 7, 8, 9… The lowest-numbered version is the one you should think about abandoning, because it’s a version that will eventually stop receiving maintenance. The idea is that, as soon as you can, you upgrade your version. Your program will be more secure and will work better and faster. For example, between version 5.6 and 7.0, there’s a big difference in the performance your page will have when you use version 7.0 compared to version 5.6. It will always run faster on version 7.0. So, if you see that your page works well on version 7.0 or higher, the higher the number, the better. Stay with that version. Now, the question that started the video: how do I switch between versions within my hosting service? I invite you to join me at the computer and I’ll show you, inside your control panel, what you need to do to change versions so you can run the necessary tests. We’re on the bacan.com page inside the control panel, and now we’re going to look in the software section. If we scroll down within the control panel, we see the software section and various options. The one we’re interested in for changing the PHP version is this one: MultiPHP Manager. We go in and find that we have the bacan domain. It also indicates the version we’re currently on, which would be PHP 7.1, and it also lets us modify the version. How is it done? We’d select the domain and here you can see we have the PHP version, and it gives us a dropdown where we can choose the version we want. Let’s imagine our program needs version 5.6. We simply select it and click Apply. See? Immediately PHP version 5.6 appears as active and our program will work perfectly. If we want to test and see if it works on version 7.0, we’d do the same thing. We select version 7.0, click Apply, and wait a second. And this way, we can test our program on the different PHP versions. And that’s the question of the day: which version are you currently using? Have you run into problems when changing versions? Let us know down below in the comments, on our channel. And as always, we encourage you to subscribe to our channel. We love having a lot of subscribers — it helps us make videos. Also, send us your questions, any doubts you have. We strive to make videos that are useful for our users. And if this video was useful and you liked it, give it a like. And we’ll see you in the next video. Cheers.