As you may or may not know CentOS Linux Version 7 comes end of life within the next year. We need to upgrade all these servers to a newer Operating System in order to continue to get Security Patches which are vital for the operation of a secure hosting environment.
With newer Linux Operating Systems the lowest version of PHP available to run websites on our control panel of choice is version 7.2. Therefore any older website needing PHP 5.6 will not work on these new servers. If you are a website owner with a website running php 5.6 we need to make special arangements to ensure your older website remains on line before do these server upgrades. Hosting websites that require such an old PHP version is therefore no longer possible on our new servers so we need to deploy additional servers for the sole purpose of hosting legacy websites needing 5.6 or lower.
New Plan: Legacy Shared Hosting php 5.6 plan
We have introduced a new hosting plan called 'Legacy Shared Hosting for php 5.6 (or lower)'. This plan comes at a surcharge of an additional £2.50 per month and anyone whose website needs php 5.6 will be charged this fee if you need to keep hosting it with us.
We need to charge this fee as we need to deploy hardware we otherwise would not need and we need to pay for additional enterprise Cloud Linux Licenses to allow us to have an older php version on these servers. The £2.50 surcharge will cover our costs in deploying these new servers plus the additional cost of the licenses for these servers.
We plan to be able to service these websites for at least the lifetime of these new servers but all website owners running software that needs an 8 year old php version should realistically be looking to make plans to talk to a web developer to have your website re-developed to allow for modern php (version 8.2 at time of writing).
