Verrotech are now offering Fedora 24 hosting with PHP 5.6 and other newer versions – ask to have your hosting migrated or a development/secondary account created on a Fedora 24 box.
Here at Verrotech we love Linux. We use it day in day out and for just about everything – including all of our business critical and hosting services.
Linux comes in a lot of different flavours (distributions) and over the years Verrotech (and Verrotech people) have used most of them at one time or another, including quite a few that have died out or morphed beyond recognition (the distributions not the people). Each distribution has its own strengths and weaknesses and truly its never one size fits all.
Quite a few years back Verrotech settled on using the RedHat stack for its actual servers. I don’t want to get into the near-endless distribution wars on this is better for X or that has feature Y, we just had the opportunity to standardise and our engineers had the most experience running mission critical services on RedHat. We still use other distributions in the organisation, for example I have an Ubuntu desktop, but we just standardised our server platforms.
Later still RedHat split their Linux into two streams RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL with a community release called CentOS [n.b. this is an over-simplification for brevity]) and Fedora.
RHEL/CentOS was an enterprise grade operating system, it was very stable (highly tested before release and subject to no major changes to break things running) and Fedora was offered as “bleeding edge technology” (latest versions, more patches, less testing but later versions).
Logically we went with the CentOS route, we want our servers to remain running for long periods and to not break hosting while remaining secure. As of 2016 we run a fleet of CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 boxes with the last CentOS 5 decommissioned. No doubt we’ll go through a process in time of migrating to CentOS 8 when it comes out and eventually decommissioning CentOS 6 as support comes to an end.
So for a long time now our “standard” hosting platform has been CentOS and this has been fine… apart from the occasional issue with versions of software. For example the CentOS 7 current PHP version is 5.4, which is ok for 95% of everything, but some newer apps such as Drupal 8 want to play with 5.6 or above. CentOS 7 doesn’t offer this out of the box and although it is possible that you can install later PHP on CentOS 7 it may not play well and hence is not suitable for shared hosting environments like ours.
Having ummed and ah’d about this we have a solution… as of now we’re provisioning our shared hosting servers with a mix of CentOS 7 and Fedora 24. By standard hosting will still be on the ultra-stable CentOS 7 but you can request for all/some/test accounts to be hosted on Fedora 24.
Having tested this we don’t think it will be any less stable than CentOS but there is always the risk that faster updates will leave software behind – so we recommend you only host items which are subject to regular updates themselves to cope with new versions. We also have plans to start provisioning Fedora-based PHP 7 hosting environments before too long.
If you want to try out Fedora hosting just let your account manager know, we’re happy to provision hosting customers a test environment on one of the Fedora servers to check out the features.