Best Web Hosting for PHP 7 December 2024

PHP is one of the popular server-side scripting languages used worldwide. Lately, it has released PHP 7 - the recent version of PHP. If you're quite familiar with PHP, you must be well aware that PHP is not frequent with its releases and therefore this release is quite a big deal although. 

What is PHP 7?

PHP 7 is the very recent major version of PHP whose first stable edition was released on December 3, 2015. The release of PHP 7 marks the first time a new version of PHP has been released in over a decade since PHP 5 was released in 2004.

After the PHP 5.0 release, a decade back in 2004 and it has moved onto PHP 7. Then what about PHP 6, you must be wondering? The PHP team decided to move past PHP 6 because it had entirely different goals compared to PHP 7. Boosting performance is the key goal of PHP 7. 

What's New with PHP 7?

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved Exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
• A secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Return and Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts

Which is the Latest Version of PHP?

Originally released on December 3, 2015, PHP 7 is the future of PHP and all the applications will need to upgrade to PHP 7 sooner or later. However, PHP 7 is the dominant version of PHP for a long decade.

PHP 5 vs PHP 7

Performance:

The performance of PHP 7 over PHP 5 has greater improvement as per Zend Technologies, Just upgrading to PHP 7 gives enormous performance upgrades. 

Return Type: 

Developers claim that it is not being able to declare a return type for their function With PHP 5. However, this is resolved in PHP 7 where you will be able to declare what type of value will be returned.

What are the Cons of PHP 7?

While there are no major drawbacks to it, here is a list of few:

• A lot of extensions are not ready yet for PHP 7.
• If anyone has functions like “ereg” and “mysql” buried deep inside their code base, they are gonna strike a Backward Compatibility wall as these functions are deprecated and, it is going to be a real pain in the behind to upgrade.

How to find a Suitable PHP hosting Provider?

Based on the PHP version you use for your project, you need to find the hosting company. By today, most hosting companies have made the switch and now offer support for PHP 7. If your website relies on PHP 7, make sure you find a host that supports and added PHP versions in their feature lists.

There are may hosts, that don't don't support the latest versions, therefore make sure to check and confirm before you signup. 

Here are points to choose a right PHP 7 hosting provider

• Find a host with PHP 7 installed
• Make sure your framework or app is compatible with PHP 7
• Consider a host that provides Linux server and CMS' tools as it'll likely support PHP well
• Make sure the host provides 24/7 customer support
• Make sure the web host is reliable, trustworthy and reputed that's been in the Industry for quite a long time.

What PHP Version do you need?