upgrading PHP and MySQL

Recently I upgraded to a VPS server... the MySQL and PHP is very out of date and I know that I desperately need to upgrade the versions. What I need however is an opinion from you guys, which versions of both work best with eachother (preferabbly PHP4+ and MySQL 4+ right?). This will help me decide which direction to go  8)

Current PHP: 4.3.2
MySQL: 3.23.58

I use php5.2 and mysql 5.0

don't go for something older, the development of php4 stops in december

Do you want to keep data from the mysql database to the new server? It will be a little problem to migrate it, because mysql 3 has a different way to login users.

For versions I would use mysql 5.0.x with php 4 and/or 5

yes I hope to be able to keep the data... I am not the one who is doing the actual migration, my host provider will be doing it for me


edit- btw what about Apache, does it need to be upgraded to? and what is the best way to check the version of apache  8)

You can check the version by the response headers. Apache should be upgraded to 2.0.x too

this was only thing I found in phpinfo:

Server API  Apache 2.0 Filter 

You need to check the response headers. If you have the web developer extension loaded in your FF, click on Information => View Response Headers when you are in your site.

Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:47:25 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.2
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

200 OK

It looks changed :)

Go through SSH, locate your httpd.conf file and check the version, it should be written somewhere :)

or try to get a 404 error page ;)

changed? I have not changed the response headers.. it must be something from the default configuration of my VPS. I wasn't able to find anything with a version number in httpd.conf

Check the manual. It is in the "manual" directory under the installation directory.

Method, upgrading mysql and php on a linux machine is not like an upgrade on some windows machines.

If you can't find version information you should ask someone to upgrade your server (or you need a possible total restart ;))

I don't guess you read this did you:


My host is doing it for me, but I want to be sure of which versions I should go to.

than its easy, just tell you provider what you need :)

ok thanks for the advice Olaf, my host says Apache doesnt need upgrade.. I think i will go with PHP's latest version (which is 5.2.4 atm i think) and Mysql 5+, i'll let them decide what specific version.

thanks everyone for your help as always the great Webdigity!

you need to trust them since the upgrade need to be supported by the control panel

Yeah that's true. Most of the people I know using cpanel have apache 1.3, and in most VPS accounts they also have outdated php versions. The bad thing for them is that they can't upgrade with yum or apt-get because Cpanel uses its own directory structure....

these guys dont use cPanel, my shared hosting wasnt even on cpanel, it is something entirely different.. the shared hosting was hSphere, and im not sure what my VPS cp is, but its "h" something lol, not hSphere but cant remember specifically..