Some of you may have noticed that HostMySite's PHP installation is a bit dated. This is due to Red Hat's Long Term Support cycle. You can read more about Red Hat's support policies here:

http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

You can see each distribution is supported for up to 7 years! Red Hat will not release a new version of PHP until the next distribution cycle, because of this we will never be able upgrade PHP to a new release on one of our shared servers which has already been deployed. It's more likely that your server will be retired for newer hardware, after a great period of time.

We follow Red Hat's guidelines to ensure that your servers are fully functional, and should something go wrong, we always have Red Hat support resources available to us. If we custom compile PHP, or install a third party distribution of PHP, on all our shared servers this support would go away. Additionally, Red Hat provides back ported security patches to ensure that we are as safe as possible without the need to upgrade to the latest version of PHP.

Unfortunately many PHP developers are looking for a more up to date version of PHP (typically 5.2.x), and for them I would recommend a VPS or dedicated solution with Zend Server.

I hope this post has been educational!

For more information on Red Hat's security policies see the following URL:

http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/

Thanks for the post. I was wondering why it was so old. The only issue there for me is that if my ecommerce software or blog software etc. requires a newer version of php then I would be forced to switch to a different shared host.