Changing your PHP Version with Freeola Hosting

Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages. This guide is designed to help with changing the active PHP version on your Freeola hosted website. For more internet help topics please visit our main Support Page.

You can change the version of PHP on your Web Hosting webspace quickly and easily through the managing MyFreeola Control Panel.

Once logged in, select My Websites from the Web Sites & Hosting section of the left-hand menu, this will display a list of your websites. Select Options & FTP Settings next to the website you would like to make this change on, then scroll down the page to see all Web Hosting Settings for this webspace.

The section titled PHP Settings will display the current PHP version. If you wish to change this, click Change PHP Settings.

The following page will allow you to select a different version of PHP for your webspace.

Please note, if your website software (such as Wordpress or Joomla, for example) and associated plugins are not compatible with the selected option, your site could cease to work intermediately upon making this change. This is especially true if you make a large upgrade to the PHP version on your site.

As such, we would always recommend updating all aspects of your Content Management System and Plugins before changing the PHP Version to help prevent this.

In order to upgrade the PHP version of your webspace on our standard hosting servers you will be required to upload an 'htaccess' file (or edit an existing file if one has already been created). This is a fairly simple file that can be created quickly and easily.

Before starting, please bear in mind that any outdated software or plugins running on your webspace may cease to work immediately following this change. As such, we would advise updating as many of these as you are able before completing the following steps.

The standard hosting servers provide the choice between a few different PHP versions, allowing you to select the highest version available to best suit your needs. The versions currently available are PHP7.0, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1.

Firstly, using a plain-text editor (such as Notepad) create a new file and enter the code for your desired PHP version from the list below:

For PHP 7.0 - AddHandler application/x-httpd-php7 .php 7.0
For PHP 7.3 - AddHandler application/x-httpd-php73 .php 7.3
For PHP 7.4 - AddHandler application/x-httpd-php74 .php 7.4
For PHP 8.0 - AddHandler application/x-httpd-php80 .php 8.0
For PHP 8.1 - AddHandler application/x-httpd-php81 .php 8.1 

Next, save this file as htaccess.txt and upload it to the required webspace using your preferred FTP client (we recommend Filezilla - a guide on using which can be seen by clicking here) into the htdocs folder. Once this file has been uploaded, rename it to .htaccess.

Depending on your FTP client, and the settings within, this file may seem to disappear at this point. This is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

If there is already an htaccess file on your webspace, simply add the above line of text to the end of the existing file.

Once this has been done the webspace will now be running your chosen version of PHP.

Alternatively, if you would like us to add this file for you, please submit a Support Ticket while logged into the managing MyFreeola account confirming the website address or sr number and we can arrange this.

Due to the nature of the RQS and InstantPro builders there is no ability - or need - to change the PHP Version that runs with your website.