php 5.x and hosting

[allegrande]

Hi,
I still have some Joomla 1.0, 1.5 and 2.5 that need php 5. In my case theese sites will stay alive this year, 2019. They will not be upgraded.

Big hosting companies like Hostgator and Bluehost have confirmed to me that they will still support Php 5.6 / 5.8.
What is your thougts about this? some companies force customers over to php 7. But will there still be hosting companies like hostgator and others that will offer php 5.6 by end of 2019?

[pe7er]

PHP = software and needs to be kept up-to-date for security reasons and performance.
For current PHP versions (see http://php.net/supported-versions.php ) it is done by the PHP organisation that knows PHP very well.

There will still be some hosting companies that will offer old PHP 5.x versions.
However, if you are using those those hosting companies, then I hope that they spend time in keeping their old PHP versions up-to-date themselves. They won't be any updates from the PHP organization.
So they have to add necessary security improvements in the source code themselves, and compile it to working PHP that they can use on their server for their customers.

How much knowledge does your hosting company have to patch & compile the software themselves?

Alternatively, if you will phase out the old Joomla websites this year, and if they are pretty static sites,
then you could consider creating a HTML only version of it. That means that you don't need PHP anymore.
However, you cannot make any changes anymore. And you cannot use it for Joomla website that display dynamic data.