> Currently - A lot of ISP's are 'stuck' with PHP5.2 or earlier simply
I don't know if this is really the case. I work in this industry, and most of the small to
mid hosting company's use cPanel or Plesk, and both include PHP 5.3. I've personally seen
very few issues moving from older PHP 5.x versions to PHP 5.3 (over about 2,000 sites, mainly small
business sites). And Plesk and cPanel do not appear to have perpetual licenses available anymore,
so ISPs that use these products are basically forced to update at minimum once a year, when their
license expires. I guess they could still technically skip upgrades, when they are prompted, but
major updates are available to them.
A real issue is RHEL (and CentOS). RHEL locks the PHP major version to whatever it is when they
release their major version. But they also maintain their own patches, and release their own
updates, which slightly makes up for it. So RHEL6 will have whatever PHP that was around, then,
which I hope is PHP 5.3 (I don't have any RHEL6 servers yet). So RHEL6 will always be PHP5.3.x
based.
But the update pipeline is still a few months, so it is important that each release is a good
release. Plus, don't worry about the Non-Updating ISP. That is less of an issue that it once
was.
Tom