We are happy to announce that both PHP 8.1 and 8.2 are now available at Gigahost!

PHP 8.1 is a major update of the PHP language and contains many new features, including enums, readonly properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, performance improvements and more.

PHP 8.2 is another major update and includes features such as readonly classes, null, false, and true as stand-alone types, deprecated dynamic properties, performance improvements and more.

Since PHP 8.1 and 8.2 are major releases, upgrading may break some web sites. So make sure to test your site when changing to one of the new versions. On Gigahost, you can change the version for each domain name, and always revert to the earlier version in case something doesn't work out.

The PHP version can be changed in the Gigahost Control Center by selecting the domain name and then “PHP version”.

PHP 8.0 has just been released today. The new version brings a slew of great new features, such as:

1. Just-in-time compiler that speeds up code execution
2. Union types that allow you to define a type as a combination of other types, for instance a function that accepts int or float
3. The match expression, enabling a shorter way of writing switch-like statements
4. The nullsafe operator, enabling null coalescing on methods
5. Named arguments, so you do not need to remember the order of arguments in a function call
6. Attributes, adding metadata to classes
7. Three new string comparison functions (str_contains(), str_starts_with(), and str_ends_with())

and many more things.

PHP 8.0 is available on your Gigahost account as of today.

Since PHP 8.0 is a major release, it may break some websites. Make sure to test your site when changing to the new version. On Gigahost, you can change the version for each domain name and always revert to the earlier version in case something does not work out.

The PHP version can be changed in the Gigahost Control Center by selecting the domain name and then “PHP version”.

The PHP team released PHP 7.4 today, bringing a few bigger new features and many small refinements.

PHP preloading can yield a significant performance boost, especially for large frameworks using a lot of libraries.

PHP extensions can be loaded directly from userland, meaning this can be done without configuration on the server.

Arrow functions, like in JavaScript, allow for shorter syntax when you define closure functions. Class properties can be type hinted. You can use the spread operator (...) in arrays.

Check this blog article at stitcher.io for a full list of changes in PHP 7.4.

From today, all Gigahost accounts can use PHP 7.4.

The PHP team has released PHP 7.3, and Gigahost is happy to announce immediate support for the new PHP version.

PHP 7.3 introduces flexible support for the Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax, new Multibyte String features, trailing commas in function calls, and a lot of other smaller changes.

The new version also deprecates a number of old features, such as case-insensitive constants and passing ASCII codepoints to string-searching functions.

You can select the new PHP version for each of your sites from inside the Gigahost Control Center.

Today, PHP 7.2 was released by the PHP team. It is immediately available for customers on Gigahost.

PHP 7.2 introduces a few new features such as the object data type for type hints in parameters and return types, a new hashing algorithm, and the powerful Sodium library for encryption and hashing. This makes PHP the first language to add modern encryption to its standard library.

To try out PHP 7.2, select any of your domains in the Gigahost Control Center and switch the PHP version.

The PHP team has just announced the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0.

The update brings new features such as nullable types for parameters and returns, the void return type, a new iterable pseudo-type, and much more.

PHP 7.1 is supported on Gigahost already, so you can go ahead and give it a try! Select any of your domain names in the Control Center, and choose “PHP Version” to change to PHP 7.1.

For several months we have been offering the pre-release versions of PHP to all our customers, and today we are excited to see that the final PHP 7.0.0 has been released! So, what's new:

Up to 2X faster!

PHP 7 is based on the PHPNG (Next-Gen) project and will make your web sites run much faster. People are reporting speed gains from 25% to 70% in real-world situations.

More function argument type hints

When defining a function, you can now declare which parameter types the function will accept. Previously, you could declare certain class names or the special array keyword, but now you can also use bool, float, int, and string. About time! Furthermore, it is now possible to declare what the function will return. You can use the same types as when declaring the parameters. So this function will automatically return a float when invoked from other parts of the application:

<?php
function sum($a, $b): float {
    return $a + $b;
}
?>

The spaceship operator

A handy operator that Perl users may be familiar with can now be used in PHP: <=>. It looks a bit like a spaceship and is used to compare values, like the strcmp() function does.

The null coalesce operator

This shorthand operator, ??, is a short way of checking whether a value is set, or defaulting to another value. In the following example, $username will be set to $_GET['username'] if that variable is set, or nobody otherwise.

<?php
$username = $_GET['username'] ?? 'nobody';
?>

It is shorter than using isset().

There are several other new features in PHP 7, as well as a lot of clean-up of inconsistencies. Check the complete list of new features on php.net.

PHP 7.0.0 is available today for all Gigahost users. Log on to the Control Center to enable it; you can do it on a per-domain basis!

The PHP team released PHP 5.6 yesterday, and we have made a tradition of supporting new PHP versions right as they come out.

Starting today, you can select PHP 5.6 for each of your web sites in the Gigahost Control Center!

While most readily available CMS and other scripts do not yet require PHP 5.6, you may find it useful to switch already if you plan on using any of the new features in PHP 5.6:

Simple expressions supported in constants

Constants are no longer restricted to being a static value. Their values may now include simple calculations that depend on other constants, like so:

const ONE = 1;
const TWO = ONE * 2;

A new operator for calculating exponentials, **

Curiously, PHP did not have an operator for exponentiation until now. You had to use the pow() function. Now, to calculate 2⁴, you just do 2 ** 4, which gives you 16.

Argument unpacking

If you have an array containing some items, you can use the array as the arguments for a function using the ... operator.

$arguments = [1, 2, 3];
my_function(...$arguments);

This would call my_function(1, 2, 3).

Variadic functions

Similarly, a function can receive its parameters as an array using the ... operator.

function my_function(...$arguments) {
  print_r($arguments);
}

In the above example, calling my_function(1, 2, 3) would print an array containing the three integers.

And more

There are a lot of minor tweaks and improvements in PHP 5.6, such as a new way to set the default character set, operator overloading in GMP, constant-time hash comparisons, a GOST hashing algorithm, improved SSL security, and a magic __debugInfo() method to add to what var_dump will tell about an object. For a complete overview, see PHP's New features page.

Try out the new PHP version by selecting one of your domain names in the Control Center, and then choose “PHP version”. You can always revert to any of the other supported versions: PHP 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, and 5.2.

As the first shared-hosting provider in Europe to do so, we are happy to announce our immediate support of PHP 5.5.0.

PHP 5.5 was released by the PHP development team earlier today and is now available on every Gigahost account. The new version of PHP brings a number of nice features, such as:

Generators

Write small functions that retain their local state, even between runs. Use the new yield keyword to “return” the next value that the function generates. It makes a lot of code more compact and neat.

New API for password hashing and salting

In order to store passwords securely, they need not only be one-way encrypted (hashed), but also use a strong salt, so that the hashed version of the password cannot be looked up in big databases (rainbow tables). Some hashing functions are also slow on purpose, to limit the number of attempts a computer can make to look up passwords. However, hashing algorithms sometimes change and become more advanced as computing power increases.

In PHP 5.5, you get a new set of functions that simplifies this process and allows you to easily change the hashing algorithm used in your application.

Send emails with cURL

cURL is now able to send emails directly through an SMTP server. This is useful if you need to send email through an external mail server, such as your corporate server or Gmail.

And yes, cURL is built into the PHP versions we run on Gigahost.

Finally, finally

A language construct that many other object-oriented languages have had for a while is finally, allowing you to run clean-up procedures that always trigger, no matter whether an exception was caught or not. finally has now made its way to PHP as well, so go ahead and use it.

Should I upgrade?

At the moment, developers of various systems are still tweaking their program code to make sure it works with PHP 5.5. If you have no issues running PHP 5.3 or 5.4, it does not hurt to keep using those versions. If you are developing your own systems, you may want to choose PHP 5.5 so you are sure your sites work with the newest PHP version. However, if you are still running PHP 5.2, we do recommend upgrading to any newer version, since 5.2 is outdated and no longer kept up to date with security updates.

You can choose PHP 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and PHP 5.5 in the Control Center for each website you have. This way, you can keep one site running an old and well-proven version while you develop or test on, for example, a subdomain running PHP 5.5.

P.S. Some of you may already have seen PHP 5.5 in the Control Center for several months. That is because we offered the previous beta versions and release candidates as soon as they came out.

We can now offer PHP 5.4. That means you can use PHP 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4. You can choose different PHP versions for each domain. To switch to PHP 5.4, choose it in the Control Center under Domains > More Settings.

This is already available for new accounts. We will continue rolling it out so every user will be able to choose PHP 5.4.

PHP 5.4 offers some new functions and, at the same time, removes some old ones. As this can affect your scripts, we recommend that you read PHP’s changelog.

Around a month ago, version 5.3 of the popular scripting language PHP was released, and it is now available in the Control Center.

What's new in PHP 5.3

PHP 5.3 adds support for new features such as namespaces, closures, a native MySQL driver, and many others. Read more here.

Opt in per domain

PHP 5.3 is not enabled by default, because many web applications need to be modified or updated first. For example, warnings may arise about features that have been deprecated — functions that are being phased out and probably will not work in PHP 6.0. You can choose PHP 5.2 or PHP 5.3 for each domain individually, though new domains still default to PHP 5.2. This makes it easy to test whether a site works with PHP 5.3, with the option to quickly switch back to PHP 5.2 if any problems arise.

Last night we updated our web servers, which now run PHP version 5.2.8. More than 170 errors have been fixed since version 5.2.6.

Full list of changes

A full list of changes can be found on php.net.

The team behind the PHP scripting language has released PHP 5.2.6. This release fixes a large number of minor bugs and security vulnerabilities. If you've chosen to use PHP 5 in the Control Center, you'll automatically be running the new version.