PHP 7.2 Now Available on All Hosting Plans!

We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 7.2 on all our shared, reseller and semi-dedicated hosting services.  PHP 7.2 is the second point release in the 7.x series and it comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

• Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
• Counting of non-countable objects
• Object typehint
• HashContext as Object
• Argon2 in password hash
• Improve TLS constants to sane values
• Mcrypt extension removed
• New sodium extension
• And much more

To enable PHP 7.2 all you need to do is login to cPanel go to ‘Select PHP Version’:

From here just pick PHP 7.2 from the drop down and set it as your current PHP version.  After this you’ll be able to manage extensions as you would for any PHP version we offer and your entire account will use PHP 7.2.

If you were curious about some of the new features and improvements here’s a quick overview of them:

Argon2 Password Hash

PHP 7.2 introduced the Argon2 hashing algorithm which was selected as the winner of the 2015 password hashing competition.  It’s a secure alternative to the Bcrypt algorithm and is just as easy to implement.

password_hash('password', PASSWORD_ARGON2I);

It also introduces the following constants to the password hash:

• PASSWORD_ARGON2I
• PASSWORD_ARGON2_DEFAULT_MEMORY_COST
• PASSWORD_ARGON2_DEFAULT_TIME_COST
• PASSWORD_ARGON2_DEFAULT_THREADS

New Object Type

A new type object has been introduced which can be used for parameter type hinting and return typing as well.

<?php
function test(object $object) : object
{
     return new SplQueue();
}

test(new StdClass());

If your website software/application supports PHP 7.2 we suggest giving it a try. Our PHP Selector makes it easy to switch between PHP versions so you can revert back to an older version at any time. We hope you all find this to be a useful release!