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PHP4 was launched in May 2000 as version 4.0.0. Its latest and final version was released in August 2008 as 4.4.9. During his 8 years of existence of PHP4, the internet boomed with billions of pages online. This same period saw the creation of popular platforms like Google, Youtube, Facebook, mySpace, Amazon and many others.

In the same time, many businesses and corporations invested money in developing websites, applications and back office systems. This investment represents millions man-hours and millions dollars of hard earned money. Add to this, many individuals or small business have developed successful blogs, forums, websites and eCommerce platform in PHP4. So what?

PHP, whatever the version, is like many free open source products: you can download it and use it for free to any purpose. However, there is no expressed or implied warranty of any kind. If you spend your loan developing a professional platform that stops working at the next update of PHP, you can’t complain; this is part of the game.

Many websites developed during the 8-years era of PHP4 don’t work with PHP5. For basic personal websites, people can probably afford to spend a couple of hours, or likely a day, updating their job to make it compatible with the latest version of PHP. For larger projects, it is not an option. We can’t expect that a Business Manager returns to his banker asking for money to scrap a 5-year project and rebuild the same under PHP5. Even code written for PHP5 will be deprecated someday.

At FIAHOST, we like to stay on top of latest technologies. For this reason, we always invest in the latest available hardware and make sure that we have got the latest software versions for our customers. In the same time, we cannot drop our customers that still rely on PHP4 to run their websites. For this reason, we keep machines with PHP4 and others with PHP5. Both machines have the same top notch hardware and same mind blowing level of performance.

This is part of our business continuity commitment.