PHP Selector Now Available On All Hosting Plans

The version of PHP offered on our server has a major impact to customers. While some customers like to test their scripts with newer version of PHP, others run some older scripts that are not compatible with the newer versions of PHP. For a long time there has been a battle for us on the best version to run. While we don’t want customers site to break by running newer version of PHP, we also don’t want to run an outdated version of PHP that is no longer being updated or supported. This is a battle that has not only effected us, but the hosting industry as a whole.

For the last couple years we did have the option of running 2 versions of PHP via a feature of LiteSpeed Web Server. It was a good temporary solution, but the management of keeping the 2 versions working together and up to date was nothing more than a nightmare. Definitely not a long term solution, but it did help in the short term.

About a year ago, Cloudlinux (The operating system we run on all our servers) released PHP Selector. Although it looked promising, it was not yet compatible with Litespeed. Even though it was not yet compatible with our web server, we began testing it on our testing servers. We were quite impressed with the features and simplicity of it. The options of choosing between multiple PHP versions, select only the PHP modules you would like to run, and the ability so set PHP values that you would otherwise have to do via a .htaccess or php.ini file.

Earlier this year the teams at LiteSpeed and CloudLinux finally got together and got this working on Litespeed. That was great news, but we are not ones to jump the gun. So we waited a few weeks to make sure there were no issues that were not yet discovered. After a few weeks we began rolling this out on our testing servers. We were happy to find that it worked well with Litespeed and were confident this would be a great addition to our hosting plans and began rolling this out on our servers….Hooray!

MonsterMegs Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and Semi-Dedicated Hosting customers can all now benefit from increased flexibility by choosing between 4 different versions of PHP to run their web applications on their accounts. These include versions  5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5. Users will be able to change their PHP version in real time, directly from their cPanel, as often as needed. You’ll have greater flexibility in installing newer software (such as Joomla 3, for example, which requires PHP 5.3+), or legacy software that may require older PHP versions.

You’ll find the PHP version selection tool in your cPanel, under Software/Services > Select PHP Version as you can see below:

Once you click the Select PHP Version link, you will be brought to the page similar to the image below. Here you can choose the PHP version you would to run or you can change back to the native (default) PHP version being run on the server. This is also where you can choose the PHP modules you would like to run. Does it get much simpliar?

In the initial PHP Selector page, you will also find a button that states “Show PHP Settings”. By clicking on this button, you will be brought to a page that looks like the following image. As we mentioned earlier, to change php values in the past, you had to manually declare them in a .htaccess or php.ini file. Well this is a thing of the past. You can now choose values for the most common PHP values in a simple interface.

As PHP Selector is a new feature on our servers, there might be a bug or two, but that is common with new features such as this. We welcome customers to report any issues you may come across and we will get them worked out quickly. We hope everyone enjoys these new features and we feel this will be a great solution of the past debacle of which php version to run on our servers.