A number of popular web packages are based on PHP. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Popular content management systems like WordPress are written in PHP.

It is very important that this base layer software package be maintained up to date. I am always amazed at some of my competitors that claim they have written the best most easy to use CMS for your website, and when you look, you find that they are using a base PHP installation that is years old and full of security flaws.

The latest security fix for PHP was released on Feb 2, 2012 and we installed the upgrade on our web hosting servers this morning. This included the following PHP modules:

• php5-5.3.10
• php5-bcmath-5.3.10
• php5-bz2-5.3.10
• php5-calendar-5.3.10
• php5-ctype-5.3.10
• php5-curl-5.3.10
• php5-dba-5.3.10
• php5-dom-5.3.10
• php5-exif-5.3.10
• php5-filter-5.3.10
• php5-ftp-5.3.10
• php5-gd-5.3.10
• php5-gettext-5.3.10
• php5-hash-5.3.10
• php5-iconv-5.3.10
• php5-imap-5.3.10
• php5-json-5.3.10
• php5-mbstring-5.3.10
• php5-mcrypt-5.3.10
• php5-mssql-5.3.10
• php5-mysql-5.3.10
• php5-mysqli-5.3.10
• php5-openssl-5.3.10
• php5-pdo-5.3.10
• php5-pdo_mysql-5.3.10
• php5-pdo_sqlite-5.3.10
• php5-pgsql-5.3.10
• php5-phar-5.3.10
• php5-posix-5.3.10
• php5-session-5.3.10
• php5-simplexml-5.3.10
• php5-soap-5.3.10
• php5-sqlite-5.3.10
• php5-sqlite3-5.3.10
• php5-tidy-5.3.10
• php5-tokenizer-5.3.10
• php5-xml-5.3.10
• php5-xmlreader-5.3.10
• php5-xmlwriter-5.3.10
• php5-zip-5.3.10
• php5-zlib-5.3.10

So the next somebody tries to sell you on their hosting plan, or their “homegrown” CMS system, ask them a simple question. “What version of PHP are they running?” If they do not keep up to date, then give us a call for the most reliable web hosting money can buy. You deserve no less.