PHP 7 available on JoomlaHost and Dnshosting web servers

Let's start again from the previously mentioned article to summarize the php versions that are currently still officially supported:

PHP version 5.4 This version was put into EOL (End Of Life) last September 14, 2015, therefore no updates have been released since this date;

PHP version 5.5 This version is already in the last year of support, which ended on June 20, 2016, so the version has just been placed in EOL status;

PHP version 5.6 For this version of PHP we are still in the active support phase, i.e. the phase in which resolutions of operational and security bugs are released based on the reports that the community regularly receives from PHP developers from all over the world. This phase will end on August 28, 2016, when version 5.6 will begin its last year of support and will then be put into EOL on August 28, 2017.

After this brief summary, which php versions are available on JoomlaHost and Dnshosting hosting? We try to provide an answer based on the needs of our users and the versions of Joomla! and WordPress that are used, to always guarantee maximum compatibility with your websites.

At the moment we therefore maintain compatibility with all versions of the CMS used, in fact, versions of PHP 5.3, 5.5 and 5.6 are available on our web servers.

PHP 7, a new version On December 3, 2015, a new version of PHP was officially released, 7.0.0 to be precise

This new version has brought many new features, especially for the correct functioning of version 3.5 of Joomla!

To make you better understand what new features we are talking about, we had our Help Desk Manager, Fabio Assenzio, carry out some comparison tests. I leave the floor directly to him to explain the results obtained:

"The version of php7 is truly phenomenal when compared with the previous ones, in the IT world it is always said that the evolution of the software does not lag behind that of the hardware, so this is a moment in which a truly important step forward has been taken.

PHP version 7 has twice the speed of execution than version 5.6 and 30% less RAM consumption, but what exactly does this mean for a website?

I ran a comparison test between PHP version 5.6 and version 7 for a Joomla website on our SSD Hosting servers. This test was performed in a protected environment, this means that the website was not reachable from the outside and did not have any server-side or Joomla-side cache system active, I opted for this configuration to eliminate any "background noise" that would have dirty the results.

Here is the image that summarizes the comparative test:

30% RAM Consumed We know that a quality hosting service guarantees you sufficient RAM for the execution of your php scripts, we can say that in recent years you have rarely come across this problem if you purchase a quality hosting service.

The average values of RAM dedicated to a hosting service are by default around 100mb and are more than sufficient to offer the resources necessary for a medium-sized site. For example, on our hosting services we start from 96mb and go up to 200mb of dedicated RAM, but when could the RAM dedicated to you be too small for you?

Excessive RAM consumption usually occurs with websites that require automated operations (called CRON) that extract data from rather important databases such as size and number of tables (we are mainly talking about e-commerce sites) or with websites that use sliders and large images, but be careful because even a poorly written extension could cause this problem. Here the new version of PHP 7 comes to our aid and helps us consume less memory (-30%!) and precious resources for our site.

Improved Execution Time The execution time reduced by 50% significantly impacts the speed of our site, as can be seen from the image the execution time of queries on the database has improved significantly (from 42 to 27 milliseconds) but the most important data is that relating to the response time which has dropped from 1.05 seconds to 629 milliseconds, i.e. by almost 40%.

This fantastic improvement is possible mainly due to the fact that the requests per second to return your homepage are higher. This means that, with the same resources, i.e. the same number of php processes, your site will be able to support more visitors, right?

Ok Joomla! it's faster, but what about other CMSs? The other CMS on the market also benefit from PHP version 7. Let's talk, for example, about WordPress which, thanks to PHP 7, can manage almost double the requests per second compared to version 5.6

As regards CMS dedicated to e-commerce, Magento also greatly improves the number of requests that can be delivered in the same second to users who visit the online store, both for the homepage and for the product catalogues.

Here is another image that better explains this comparison between different versions of php using other CMS:

[Image source: //www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic]" SSD Hosting and PHP 7: what more do you want? For us it is essential to guarantee our users total hosting security and greater compatibility for the hosted websites. In order to achieve this result it is important to always keep the php versions updated. To date we can state that on our Hosting with SSD Technology we guarantee total compatibility with php 7.

At this point you may be wondering, why only today given that the php 7.0.0 version was released at the beginning of December 2015? We waited precisely because, being a new version, many of the most used extensions (in particular relating to version 3.5 of Joomla!) were still not compatible with PHP 7 and, by implementing it immediately, we would certainly have caused damage to users (please refer to the official PHP Changelog to view the updated versions). Our work was to test the compatibility before the official release on our hosting servers. Implementing Php 7 immediately would certainly have been "commercially attractive", but we preferred to be certain of the results of our tests because our goal is to provide our hosting services with quality and professionalism, always guaranteeing the best to our users.

So from today your site in Joomla! or in WordPress (or with any other CMS), if hosted on the JoomlaHost and Dnshosting SSD Hosting, it will have no rivals in terms of Security and Speed: SSD Technology, SSL Certificates and PHP 7... what more do you want? If you answer "a Lucano" we may offer you that too! ;)