An official email sent by HostGator to customers states that, "HostGator will be making PHP 5 part of the standard working environment on all servers, as well as upgrading MySQL from version 4.1 to 5.0."

All current poduction servers will be upgraded starting March 2008 and all new servers will begin using PHP 5 immediately. "We are aware that differences in PHP4 and PHP5 can lead to minor problems and instabilities in certain scripts, and are taking every measure possible to ensure your websites continue to function," says Host Gator.

There is also an active discussion on the Host Gator forum. "As you all know, we're changing the servers to PHP 5 in a little under a month. Even if you manually specify PHP 4 handlers during this transition period (using AddHandler for example), it's important to realize that it's only a way for you to buy more time if absolutely necessary in your case. PHP 4 will be permanently removed in the near future, as it's no longer being developed or maintained."

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. On July 13th, 2007 the PHP development teama announced that PHP 4 will be discontinued. PHP 5 was released well over three years ago but has never gained significant popularity because of backwards compatibility issues with PHP 4 scripts.

HostGator is a major hosting company and is known for offering the Hatchling, Baby and Swamp shared hosting packages at competative prices. Recently HostGator announced that it be launching a new Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service.

Vivid Tools is a growing design and development company located in Canada's Innovation and Technology Triangle. Vivid Tools offers an array of web design and development solutions including: hosting and installation, custom component and module development and professional site management.