We’re excited to announce the latest PHP 7 is now available with immediate effect on all Ecenica cPanel servers. Try PHP 7 and experience a speed boost on your Ecenica hosted websites today!
What is PHP7
PHP 7 is the very latest version of PHP, the execution engine which powers popular web apps such as WordPress, Magento, Joomla! and Drupal. The project has been under development for most of 2015 and we’re excited to announce we’ve made PHP 7 available on all our shared cPanel hosting servers.
It’s important for us to note that at the moment PHP 7 is stable, but still in release candidate status. As such it’s not recommended for live websites. But we wanted to make it available to help you develop and update your website to take advantage of it’s expected release in November 2015.
What are the benefits of PHP 7
There’s a whole host of benefits, but the main benefit of PHP 7 is it’s speed. There’s a lot of benchmarks out there and the performance increases are incredible.
The effects of PHP 7 on WordPress is immediately clear. Twice as many requests per second can be handled compared to PHP 5.6, making PHP 7 the fastest execution engine available now for WordPress.
In Magento the speed boost of PHP 7 is equally clear. The faster execution times will mean your shoppers can navigate your Magento websites faster, searching and viewing more products.
Checkout the full infographic of Zend benchmarks
Why should I use PHP 7
It’s faster than current PHP 5.* versions.
The default opcode caching offers big performance increases. PHP 7 also features a new AST-based compilation process, memory optimizations and refactoring and cleanup of older code.
How can I activate PHP 7 on my Ecenica Hosting
The awesome news is you can activate and start running PHP 7 on your Ecenica cPanel hosting package from today.
It’s super easy to activate, simply login to your Ecenica web hosting control panel and use our PHP selector to enable PHP 7 on your website.
We’re currently providing latest PHP 7.0.0 RC8 (Release Candidate 8) and will update this as newer versions of PHP 7 are released.
Are there any issues with PHP 7
PHP 7 is a major change so it’s possible you’ll see some issues. Some PHP functions have been depreciated so if you’re upgrading an existing site then it’s not 100% guaranteed that it will work straight away. We recommend developers check this Zend article for more information about compatibility issues.
Our in-house experts have tested PHP 7 against default installs of WordPress, Magento, Joomla! and Drupal from our 1-click App Installer and found no issues.
But we know a lot of you run plugins on your WordPress sites so it’s definitely worth testing PHP 7 first and checking your plugins for compatibility.
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