We are happy to announce that PHP 7 is now available on all (without exception) packages GlowHost offers, including shared, reseller, cloud, semi-dedicated, and dedicated servers!

This is great news because the GlowHost team has been looking forward to the release of the newest PHP version for quite some time. The key to PHP 7’s success here is performance! Zend Technologies claims that this new version is the most important change since 2004, when PHP 5 appeared. For those who think that was a few years ago – guess again. 12 years have passed already!

So, what is the deal with PHP 7?

We do our best to make servers as fast as possible including tweaks, installing CloudLinux on shared servers and constantly searching for new ways to make customers’ websites run as smooth as possible. Heavy web apps have a history of consuming too many resources and we make every effort to optimize the server to prevent issues. Sadly, many server resources are still consumed unnecessarily because the code optimization itself is not adequate. One example of this which happens quite often is third party plugins for popular CMS apps.

These issues were taken into consideration by the PHP 7 team. As a result, we get extremely increased performance throughout. I should quote the official page of Zend Technologies that mentions “explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption and new awesome features for developers.” Sounds good to us!

Sound too good to believe? Just check the Drupal official test results on PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0. Isn’t the difference impressive? As you have probably noticed, PHP 7 brings 2x the performance improvement to Drupal installation. That means that your website will operate much faster and consume less resources. Yay!

Did you know that GlowHost servers are optimized for Drupal 8?

Since PHP 7 was recently released, there are not many web apps that support it yet. Most of the popular apps like WordPress, Drupal and Magento already have support and more are coming very soon. Zend found that Drupal 8 is 72% faster on PHP 7 and that WordPress required 75% less servers to run the same number of sites. Magento was also found to run 3x faster on PHP 7 which means when you host with us and setup PHP 7 (no extra fee) on your account you will be sure to experience some of the fastest site speeds available.

Not enough proof of the awesomeness? Zend has shared other performance charts and information about other scripts that already have PHP 7 support. You can check these out here.

What about GlowHost’s involvement? We have already prepared for this release and now provide our valued customers the ability to use PHP 7! Just enable it via the PHP Selector in your cPanel account and you are ready to go. This will be handy for website owners who would like to get all the advantages of the new technology (please ensure before you upgrade that your code is PHP 7 ready) and for web developers working on new code that will consume far less resources!

Want to see just how your performance is doing? You can do so using the “CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage” tool in your GlowHost cPanel. Here you can monitor your resource consumption and make your own conclusions regarding PHP 7. Feel free to share your observations in comments!