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devonian's avatar

Problems with Hosting - PHP7

Hi all, I've been having real problems with my webhost since I upgraded the Laravel 5.5 as it requires PHP 7 as a minimum.

The problems I seem to have encountered is that most hosting companies servers come preinstalled with PHP 5.4 - you can then choose within Plesk a PHP version (such as PHP 7) which is essentially 'layered' on top.

Problem is this doesn't install PHP 7 on the command line - so making updates, etc doesn't work. Making things a real headache.

I've spoken to my host about manually installing PHP 7 on the command line and they highly advised against doing this as it would likely break things. I went against their advice and did install PHP 7 on the command line, and it did rather spectacularly cause carnage.

I have tried using LaravelForge but really wasn't keen on the whole setup.

I guess I'm asking what can I do? Can anyone recommend any good hosts where PHP 7 is installed as standard on the command line?

Really hope someone can assist me here.

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4 replies
devonian's avatar

Hi xmarks,

Apologies for the delayed reply - hope you have a great Christmas.

I've spoken to my superiors and using Forge is not an option.

Can you recommend any hosts that are truly PHP 7 ready, with PHP 7 on the command line - most seem to use PHP 5.4 and instead layer 7 on the top of it...

cmdobueno's avatar

@devonian

I would suggest using linode or digital ocean. No need to use forge in this realm, it is not required.

Generally when I deal with setting up a fresh server I like to go with

CentOS 7 Nginx PHP 7 (I install from the webtatic repo) MariaDB 10.2 (maybe 3 been about month... but whatever the latest and greatest is) NodeJS & NPM

There are plenty of guides on the install, and sometimes you can even find prebuilt install scripts for both digital ocean and linode. I preffer linode over digitial ocean but both are nearly equal across the board, and as stated there are a few discounts for digital ocean.

The benefit to using these two services are that you effectively have a fully scalable dedicated server that you can grow or shink in side (and cost) as the app goes from dev to live and requires more demand.

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