One of the most common questions we get is about PHP 5.3.5 and when it will be available on our shared hosting platform. The answer to that question is, if you are using Linux hosting: right now!

As you know, we love adding new features but we hate removing them. Adding PHP 5.3.5 to our Linux hosting platform alongside PHP 4.4 and PHP 5.2, without negatively impacting our customers, was our main focus. And we’ve achieved exactly that.

It has always been easy to switch between the PHP versions. You can choose to use the PHP version switcher in eXtend if you want to turn your entire site to PHP 5.3.5 (see screen shot below).

Alternatively you can simply add the following line into a .htaccessfile in a directory within your public_html, and that’ll turn on PHP5.3.5 for just that directory (and the directories below it):

SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 53

For those of you who use our advanced features such as scheduled tasks (aka cron), then you can use the following path to the PHP 5.3.5 interpreter:

/usr/bin/php53

And, just like with our other PHP versions, if you want to add your own custom directives in your own php.ini files, you can add them at any level along the path to your PHP script, and it will include them just as version 4.4 and 5.2 do.

Resellers

You can offer the PHP switcher to your Linux hosting customers via the eXtend control panel. Just make sure the tick box next to ‘Switch PHP version’ in Configure hosting packages has been ticked.