PHP 5.6 available on our Cloud VPS platform

Posted on by Dora

PHP 5.6 hosting

Over a year after PHP 5.5 was released, the latest and greatest version 5.6 has just arrived and is already supported on our fully managed Cloud VPS hosting platform.

New features in our PHP 5.6 hosting

Here are some of the highlights of this new version of PHP:

  • Constant scalar expressions: you can now provide static scalar expressions, so you can now use static expressions (in the past you could only use static values), e.g. in function arguments, const declarations or property declarations;

  • Memory usage using POST has been reduced;

  • An interactive debugger called phpdbg has been implemented – you can access it from the command line to debug your code step-by-step;

  • Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted (but check you have enough server resources before doing this!);

  • php://input is now reusable;

  • Many SSL/TLS improvements such as protection against attacks, improved peer verification, fingerprinting SSL certificates, and significant enhancements when using encrypted streams;

  • Variadic functions and argument unpacking can now be implemented using the ‘…’ operator (known as the Splat Operator if you’re familiar with Ruby terminology);

  • Exponentiation using the ** operator;

  • Importing constants and functions is now supported by the use keyword;

  • GMP objects now support operator overloading and casting to scalar types.

You can check the detailed PHP 5.6 migration guide which explains these new features and changes in detail so you can more efficiently create new code, and so you can verify your current code is 5.6 compatible.

We recommend that you clone your website into a new webspace and enable PHP 5.6 (see below) to verify everything works correctly.

This is expected to be the final major release of PHP 5.x before the jump to PHP 7.0, expected to be at least a year from now.

A full list of new features in 5.6 is published on the official PHP site.

How do I enable PHP 5.6 hosting?

Check here for instructions about how to install PHP 5.6 on our Plesk Cloud VPS services.

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Try our PHP 5.6 managed hosting today!