In our constant endeavor to improve our Shared Hosting infrastructure, we are working towards making our Windows Shared Hosting Platform more stable and secure. One of the recent improvements we are planning is to reduce the number of vulnerabilities on our servers because of older versions of PHP. For the benefit of our customers and their applications, we have been supporting older versions of PHP that even the PHP community had stopped supporting long ago (reference).

As part of this security effort, we have decided to (i) deprecate the older versions of PHP (all versions older than 8.2) from our servers; and (ii) withdraw support for these deprecated PHP versions. These versions have shown the highest number of vulnerabilities and insecurities over the last few years. These versions of PHP have also stopped receiving support from the PHP community some time ago (PHP Unsupported Branches)

Key Timelines:

Deprecation of older PHP versions – This is already done on January 6, 2025, and the following changes happened as a result:

• New customers will only have access to PHP 8.2 and above.
• Existing websites will remain on current versions until they are upgraded.
• Any new domains or hosting packages will default to PHP 8.2 or higher.

February 3, 2025: Soft upgrades for older PHP versions start.

• Each website running an older PHP version will be tested for compatibility with PHP 8.3. If a site is unstable on PHP 8.3, lower versions will be tested until a stable version is found.
• Websites incompatible with higher versions will remain on their current version. Minimal disruption is expected.

March 3, 2025: Mandatory upgrades to PHP 8.2 and higher.

All hosting packages will be upgraded to PHP 8.2 or higher, and older versions will no longer be supported.

What needs to be done?

We will be trying to upgrade all customer websites which are running on the older versions to version 8.2 or above. This will ensure higher security for not only your website but also higher availability and performance.

We request you to get your websites upgraded to PHP version 8.2 or above before the stipulated time frame. If that is not possible, we will attempt to perform the upgrade on your behalf in the safest manner possible.

How to upgrade the PHP version?

You can manage the PHP version from the Plesk panel by following the steps:

• Login to the Plesk Panel.
• Navigate to Websites & Domains and then click on PHP Settings

Disclaimer: Please ignore this message if your websites are already running on PHP 8.2 or above.

For any queries, please feel free to contact our support team.