We have recently been doing a lot of work and investing heavily in our data centre, this work includes a major upgrade of our hardware but these are just the underpinnings of what is essentially an overhauled hosting platform.
Names.co.uk is the first UK hosting provider to offer PHP 7 on it’s shared hosting environment, so if you are a keen developer you may want to get to work ensuring that your website is PHP 7 compliant. The beauty of our hosting packages is that the PHP version can be directory specific, so whilst you may want to continue running PHP 5.6 on your already established website, you can run a test environment for the next iteration of your website on a subdirectory which runs on PHP 7 and it won’t impact how your current website performs.
Changing the PHP version in use is as simple as detailing just which version of PHP you’d like to use in a .htaccess file, with the exception of unsupported versions, of course!
If I’m on PHP 5 now, why the jump to PHP 7, where is PHP 6?
The PHP 6 project was abandoned in 2010. Bits of it made it into PHP 5.3, most of the rest into PHP 5.4, but not before books were published for “PHP 6″. To avoid confusion with the older project, the new version of PHP is now called PHP 7.
Some of the features of PHP 7:
- Anonymous classes
- Closure::call()
- Constant arrays using define()
- CSPRNG Functions
- Filtered unserialize()
- Generator Delegation
- Generator Return Expressions
- Group use Declarations
- Integer Division with intdiv()
- IntlChar
- Null coalesce operator
- Return type declarations
- Scalar type declarations
- Spaceship operator
- Unicode codepoint escape syntax
A complete list of the features of PHP 7 can be found on php.net.
Why should I move from PHP 5 to PHP 7?
If the features listed above aren’t reason enough, as is normally the case with later PHP versions, PHP 7 is much more efficient and in tests carried out by 3rd parties, have shown that PHP 7 has been able to process over double the number of queries per second than PHP 5.6.
The speed at which a website loads is a factor taken into account by search engines, so if you have a PHP driven website and your website uses PHP 7 as opposed to an older version of PHP, the page load speed would likely be quicker and ultimately this page load speed can influence your websites search engine ranking.
To further improve the page load speeds, we use something called Varnish Cache. The job of Varnish cache is to store your websites static files and deliver them to your site visitors in a much quicker way than a conventional file server could, plus it reduces load on the file servers, so even at the busiest of times during the day, your website will be displaying much quicker and a lot more efficiently than it would with most other hosting providers.
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