Some WordPress plugins require you to advance your website from 5.2.xx. If you don’t you might get the WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH which is harrowing.

Hostgator’s Support site (this page)  gives the advice to modify .htaccess as follows:

“PHP 5.4 is available on all Shared and Reseller hosting accounts by adding the following code to your .htaccess file:”

• # Use PHP 5.4
AddType application/x-httpd-php54 .php

This works about 50% of the time and the other sites give Error 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR. yikes!

To upgrade then requires an online chat call with Hostgator. They are awfully nice about helping with it.  But today I was told that PHP 5.4 is NOT on all servers. If you try installing 5.3 instead you might have better luck and avoid the 20+ minutes a chat session can take.

• # Use PHP 5.3
AddType application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Where do you put that? At the top of the file will do nicely.

It’s odd that one of my NEW clients – installed in 2013 – was running on 5.2 – kind of disappointing, ‘gator.

BTW for Bluehost you can update via php.config but that’s another story.