Scalable PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 hosting

You asked for it and now it’s here! It gives us great pleasure to announce full support for PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 hosting across our Cloud VPS and Jelastic scalable hosting services. While PHP version 5.5 is new, PHP 5.4 has been available for some time on our Jelastic scalable PHP platform, but we’ve been eagerly waiting support for multiple PHP versions in the new Plesk 11.5 to launch this across our Cloud VPS range too.

Some of the top new features of PHP 5.4 hosting

• Traits allowing you to horizontally reuse code across independent classes in different class hierarchies
• Improved performance and resource usage optimisation, especially in some large apps
• Short Array Syntax to make it easier to define an array
• Direct de-referencing of function arrays
• Many other improvements such as: enhanced closure binding, ability to use objects as functions, binary number notation, native session handler interface, improved error messages and many bug fixes

Rasmus, PHP creator and special advisor to Jelastic declared that:

“Traits is probably the most talked about new feature in PHP 5.4 – think of them as compiler-assisted copy-and-paste. Traits are a feature of Scala as well. Other languages may refer to them as “mixins” – or they may not name them at all but have an extended interface mechanism that allows the interface to contain an actual implementation of its methods.In contrast to mixins, traits in PHP include explicit conflict resolution if multiple traits implement the same methods.”

You can check for more detailed explanations about migrating to PHP 5.4 in this article.

New features in PHP 5.5 hosting

• New API for password hashing using password_hash()
• Generators allow you to iterate without needing to write a class
• Improved exception handling with the ‘finally’ keyword
• Bundled opcode cache
• Even more performance improvements
• Many other improvements such as: better class name resolution, literal dereferencing for arrays and strings, several improvements to foreach loops, expression support in the empty() function

Find out how to migrate from PHP 5.4 to 5.5 here.

How do I enable PHP 5.4 or 5.5 hosting?

Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme

You can install and use multiple PHP versions and manage them from your Plesk Panel. This feature is extremely handy because you can select the optimal PHP version for each website, rather than the entire server running one version of PHP.

TIP: You could use this in combination with Plesk Panel’s website staging feature to create a copy of your website to test the code with a different version of PHP.

Click here to find out how to install the latest version of PHP on your VPS.

For those customers running PHP 5.4 or 5.5, we will routinely install the latest minor version of PHP 5.4.x or 5.5.x on our Cloud VPS range, so for our less active developers we recommend using PHP 5.3 wherever possible (where patches are back-ported for stability), and only using PHP 5.4 or 5.5 when you’re an active developer or need the newest functionality.

Jelastic scalable PHP hosting

You can switch between PHP versions in our Jelastic PaaS PHP hosting at any time by editing the topology of your environment via your Jelastic Dashboard and selecting the PHP version using the drop-down box.

TIP: You can clone your Jelastic environment to test your application code against a new version of PHP in a development environment. Simply hit the ‘clone’ button next to your Jelastic environment name.