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Quick Rant: Hosters and Updates [Update]

Hi it's me again.

PHP7.2 Released today and I went around to do a quick check of some webhosters to see who can offer it, and well it is abysmal as always.

We start off with the big German Hoster Strato which offers PHP 7.1, so far so normal, but they have a "newest version" label right next to it.
Their excuse? well testing of course, but the even worse thing was the anser regarding the "newest version label". PHP 7.1 has Long Term Support till 2019.  Are you kidding me? Newest version doesnt mean a version in acive, and DEFINITELY not a version in Security Support but the newest available version, and that's 7.2.0, Simple as that.
but we arent finished. the international variant strato.com has according to their tables only PHP 7.0, which is going out of active support in THREE DAYS.

next we have a provider also from Germany, 1&1, which in contrast to strato shows REALLY well how stuff works. they even let users run the betas of 7.2, which certainly is quite nice and while they are right now apparently on RC6, they will soon switch to 7.2.0

next on the List Domainfactory.
They just list having PHP 5 and 7, I truly hope they have 7.1 without explicitly mentioning it, and while having testing as the obvious excuse, at the very least on twitter after a needing a bit of asking why testing isnt done with, well the TESTING releases, they said they will forward it to the appripriate resources (aka talk to the responsible people in the company)

and one more: Hosttech.

Their PHP stats are an abomination. PHP 5.4 to 7.0 meaning with 5.4 and 5.5 they have 2 End of life releases, not pretty, but sadly sometimes needed, 5.6, the last 5.x version in any state of support, normal, and 7.0 which isnt a problem, but the fact that the list ends here, will be in about 3 days. on the 3rd of December the Active Support of PHP 7.0 will be dropped and it goes into security support, meaning not even one version that's on active support, and seriously, I see no sensible excuse here, I have contacted them just while writing this and I will update when I have the info.


so Long Story short, I check a few providers and while I didnt write about everyone yet, only ONE of them has PHP 7.2 pretty much ready (and if you are fine with RCs you can even go for that) but all the others, well excuses as expected and that seems to be it.



Update:

This is Pure chaos, my friend DiamantThomy also went asking many hosters, and the answers are pretty intresting.

Some Hosters apparently hadnt updated their websites but supported PHP7.2 already, others say they will have it very soon and one particularly ugly example is Colorhost.

Colorhost has, at least according to their website, just PHP5.3 and 5.4 (which are both end of Life sind 3years+3months and 2years3months respectively), and they havent responded at their twitter at all, but that account seems to be fairly inactive anyway, so there is a possibility the information there is just grossly outdated but this is still pretty bad for a company that wants to make money with hosting.


I love to say it and I will say it again. when a company makes money with hosting then they should go forward and test new PHP versions in Beta or at latest in RC state and report bugs if there are any, this helps PHP as a whole since these can be patched before release of the stable, full release version. and at the same time this helps the hoster as well since they can go forward and say that they just got PHP7.2 basically just a few hours (after a last quick test) after release.

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