PHP 7.0 is Now Default on SiteGround Servers

Last December we were among the first hosting companies to make PHP 7.0 available on our entire infrastructure. Thanks to our system which allows multiple PHPs to be used on one server, anyone could have switched to PHP 7.0 since its zero-day release, while we still kept an older and well-tested PHP version as the global default setting. Now, an year later we believe it’s time for the next step – setting PHP 7.0 as default for all new accounts.

Why make PHP 7.0 default?

Reason number one is its amazing performance gains. Regardless of our continuous efforts to popularize the availability of PHP 7 and its benefits, we are well aware that a big percentage of the users will never change their default settings. An year after the release of PHP 7.0 and 13 sub-versions later we believe that it is tested well-enough to be safely applied as default on our servers. That is why we are now making it a default setting in order to increase the level of its adoption among our users.

New accounts are now set up with PHP 7.0

Since yesterday all new shared, cloud and dedicated accounts are setup with PHP 7.0 as their default PHP version.

Existing accounts are recommended to do the switch manually

All existing accounts will remain unaffected though, as changing the PHP version for a production site should be done with caution. However, we still highly recommend to all existing users, who have not yet switched to PHP 7.0, to test if their site performs without issues (if possible on a staging copy) and enable PHP 7.0 for their site.