PHP 4 and Apache 1.3 end-of-life

This is just a short announcement to let people know that both PHP 4 and Apache 1.3 are well past their supported lifetimes from the developers. We’ve been maintaining them internally (updated as recently as last week), but it’s getting more and more difficult; our development resources are not unlimited and our efforts in this area are veering dangerously close to necromancy.

Both Apache 2.3 and PHP 5.4 are on the horizon, and we think it will best support our members if we focus more on developing new technology and less on reanimating zombies.

As a result, we are now warning those customers who are still using server types based on PHP 4 and/or Apache 1.3 that they should upgrade their site type to a newer version (the current default is Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.3) as soon as possible. Anytime after January 1, 2012, we may start performing involuntary upgrades on sites still using these outdated technologies.

To see if you have affected sites, visit the “Sites” panel in our member interface and look at the “Type” column.

The following site types are on the chopping block: PHP4, PHP5.2, and Flex*

The following site types are not affected: HTStatic, Static, 22PHP5.2, 22PHP5.3, 22Flex, 22CGI

To perform this upgrade yourself, just visit the site information panel for the affected site(s) in our member interface and select the “Change Server Type” action.

In most cases, no site content changes are required. One notable exception is HTTP basic authentication, which endured a minor change in .htaccess configuration between Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.2. PHP 5.3 does introduce more backwards-incompatible changes than previous versions. Current versions of most third-party applications (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, phpBB) are compatible with PHP 5.3, but if you have a large custom-written application, PHP 5.2 might be a good intermediate step.

*For those members using the “Flex” type, the Apache 2.2-based “22Flex” replacement is not yet publicly available; we will open it up very soon, and in any case at least a month before any involuntary upgrades are performed on Flex sites. now available to all members.

1 Comment

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1. Upgrading WordPress from PHP4 upwards can produce a minor annoyance which can be fixed by editing the MySQL table. Details here:

   http://codex.wordpress.org/Switching_to_PHP5#WordPress_and_PHP_5

   Comment by Hamad Subani — November 8, 2011 #

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