In reply to tw2113.

But what if the host hasn't updated package options to their clients since 2002? I recently moved one client off his old host because his "premium" package wouldn't run WordPress at all. He only had 100Mb of space total, and no databases at all.

Don't be so certain that the end user hasn't done the upgrades, when it's the hosting company that has lack of clue. I've run across three smaller hosting companies in the past year whose servers for shared hosting services are still running end-of-life versions of FreeBSD 6, 7 and 8 on AMD boxes with less than 2Gb of RAM. My concerns about their default still being PHP 5.2 paled under those circumstances.

The client I rescued had no idea any of that mattered, he'd just been happy paying them every month since 1997. The other one stuck to his guns and stayed with his host, but now even he has noticed some performance problems since I upgraded his site for him (issues I'd pointed out to him before we got underway).

I think Media Temple skipped over PHP 5.4 and went straight to from 5.3 to 5.5; not aware of anyone else who has done that.

If you have a lot of people with websites who aren't tech savvy and don't want to be, and they are stuck on lazy hosting providers who should know better but don't make the effort because "everything still works, why rock the boat", but since they aren't concerned about security (thereby making things rougher on everyone else) maybe more direct ways of bringing their attention to the problem are needed... like updating the minimum requirements out from under them, forcing them to update or play in a different sandbox.

I don't know that there is a good solution, but if a hosting provider hasn't updated their hardware or OS or software in 5 years, how stable and secure is their operation to begin with?