On Monday 09 July 2007, chris# wrote:

I don't claim to have made a scientific study of the subject, but from what I've seen so far web hosts fall into one of the following categories:

1) We offer PHP 5 only. 2) We offer PHP 5 and PHP 4 as an option if you ask/tweak .htaccess. 3) We offer PHP 4 and PHP 5 as an option if you ask/tweak .htaccess. 4) We offer PHP 4 and PHP 5, and you explicitly pick one when signing up. 5) We don't offer PHP 5 yet because we haven't figured out how to do that in cPanel and we're afraid of breaking stuff.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised to find that group 5 seems to be a minority. There's a fair number of hosts in groups 3 and 4 that, I think, artificially deflate PHP 5's numbers. That's made developers gun-shy.

How are the Nexen stats compiled? Johannes has said that he "has statistics" showing that PHP 5 has 60% of the market, not 20%.

Quoth Ben Franklin, "there are likes, damned lies, and statistics." But at this point I don't think the situation is as dire as everyone seems to think. The huge flood of hosts we had signing up with GoPHP5 in the first day, combined with the other hosts I've spoken to, suggest that simple inertia is the problem at this point, not simply "no hosts offer it".

-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 lar...@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson