PHP 8.1 New Default PHP Version on New Accounts

At Hawk Host, we choose the PHP version that is the most compatible with the current most popular PHP applications. Due to our use of HardenedPHP, which backports security fixes, we can even provide versions not necessarily supported by PHP directly. However, we have recently determined that all new shared, reseller and semi-dedicated accounts will use PHP 8.1 by default.

Over the past several months, support and even recommendations for using PHP 8.1 have increased significantly for the most common PHP applications deployed on our hosting. Of course, it was always easy to switch PHP versions using our PHP selector system. We, however, want to provide the easiest experience for new accounts. We believe that PHP 8.1 is the most logical default version.

Applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are now highly recommending PHP 8.x, and we believe that PHP 8.1 is a compromise between the latest version and continued compatibility with plugins and themes for those applications. PHP 8.1 brings performance improvements as well as a variety of new features.

PHP 8.1 notably has added

• Enumerations
• Readonly Properties
• First-class Callable Syntax
• New in initializers
• Pure Intersection Types
• Never return type
• Final class constants
• Explicit Octal numeral notation
• Fibers
• Array unpacking support for string-keyed arrays

Along with several other features, which you can read more about here.

PHP 8.1 has also noticable performance improvements of up to 22% on not only common applications but frameworks such as

• Laravel
• Symfony
• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Slim

If PHP 8.1 isn’t the version your application requires, we continue to support the following PHP versions.

• PHP 4.4
• PHP 5.1
• PHP 5.2
• PHP 5.3
• PHP 5.4
• PHP 5.5
• PHP 5.6
• PHP 7.0
• PHP 7.1
• PHP 7.2
• PHP 7.3
• PHP 7.4
• PHP 8.0
• PHP 8.1
• PHP 8.2
• PHP 8.3
• PHP 8.4

You can change PHP versions easily using our PHP selector system in cPanel, or if you’re having any issues, you can reach out to support, and we’ll gladly provide additional guidance.