PHP 7.1 New Default PHP Version

At Hawk Host we always value security and compatibility and with that for the past several years PHP 5.6 has been the default PHP version chosen for new accounts. PHP 5.6 recently reached end of life status ( http://php.net/eol.php ) and more and more applications are alerting users to the existence of PHP 7.1 or newer. We have now decided to continue to offer the best hosting experience the default version of PHP will now be 7.1 going forward.

For the majority of users our change from PHP 5.6 to 7.1 will have absolutely no affect on your web site. If you’re already a customer and haven’t changed your PHP version you will remain on PHP 5.6. If you’ve chosen a different version already you will also not be affected by this change. If you’re a new user then you will by default be on PHP 7.1 but you can still easily change your PHP version through our PHP selector.

The advantage of using PHP 7.1 compared to PHP 5.6 is our shared, reseller, semi-dedicated, and cloud web hosting accounts will now be up to 2 times faster under most applications by default.. This means lower response times and significantly more requests can be handled under the same web hosting account. This also means many applications including Wordpress will no longer warn users that they should be using PHP 7.1 or newer.

We’re well aware PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are also available at this point in time but we believe regardless of their further performance and feature improvements it would be unwise to expose users to compatibility issues needlessly. We will continue to monitor PHP supported versions ( https://php.net/supported-versions.php ) and recommended versions of the most common applications on our service and adjust our default PHP version as necessary.