PHP5, or not?

Published 17 November 04 by Justin French, 16 comments

The downsides are obvious. The use of TextThing will be limited to decent web hosts who aren’t afraid to keep things up-to-date. I have no doubt that more and more hosts will catch up in the coming months and years, but perhaps in the meantime I’m asking a little too much.

The upsides are a little less tangible. I’m in a unique position to build something which starts with the very best that’s available on a LAMP platform, without trying to support old versions of everything. Things will run faster, code will be cleaner, etc.

The alternative is to write some wrappers/adapters for MySQL, MySQLi, SQLite, PgSQL, etc. I’m not a big fan of those huge database abstraction classes out there, but some nice lightweight wrappers can’t be too expensive.

Who are the current “top” web hosts out there? Who do you host with? Do they support PHP 5 / MySQL 4.1 / mysqli, or are you all stuck on older builds? Would you ever move hosts to take advantage of new software?

Personally, I’d have no hesitation buying some space on a decent host to take advantage of good software and smart sysadmins, but maybe I’m alone.