PHP Version on Hosted

cerbsurf

Can anyone give me some advice on the following:

I have just setup a hosting account, they have PHP version 4.3.2 on all the servers with no immediate plan to upgrade to a newer version. How does this effect which version I should download on my local PC for testing etc? Should I be using the same version?

Thanks in advance!

Gonwee

For compatibility using the same version would limit what you can do to what the server can handle, but if you script for the right version it should work fine. Just don't write any php5 functions into your script, it will run ok in your dev enviorment, but not on your site.

MarkR

You should dump the hosting account immediately and get one who will use a non-ancient version of PHP.

No new application should be developed on < 5.1.0 in my opinion.

Mark

cerbsurf

hmm, thats what I was thinking! Any recommendations for good hosting?

lozza1978

cerbsurf wrote:
hmm, thats what I was thinking! Any recommendations for good hosting?

Theres hundreds of hosts out there, Depends on how much you wanna pay, how much space you want, how much traffic, if you want cpanel, amount of mysql databases allowed etc,

Theres too many factors involved to say which one's the best, etc, My advice would be to look around read some reviews on the hosts... and if your happy go for it.

weekender

MarkR wrote:
You should dump the hosting account immediately and get one who will use a non-ancient version of PHP.

The v4 development branch of PHP is currently on 4.4.4, so 4.3.2 really isn't that ancient. There are plenty of reasons for a host to stick with v4 - reliability, compatibility, majority verdict... the majority of php developers still code in version 4. It's a sensible decision.