I got a bill from 1&1 / IONOS last week for PHP 5.6 Extended Support. I was a little surprised by this, since I thought I’d already taken care of updating PHP to a supported version, but it turns out that I was remembering updating from 5.4 to 5.6 three years ago. (Tempus fugit.) It looks like 5.6 reached EOL at the end of 2018. So I guess I’m paying $7 now for not having upgraded PHP in a while. I went ahead and updated to 7.2.15, so I should be good now for a while, though I guess I should update to 7.3 at some point. And I’ve got WordPress updated to 5.1.1 too. Everything still seems to be working, which is nice.
Every once in a while, I think about switching to some kind of managed WordPress install, so I don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore. Maybe just the $5/month plan from wordpress.com or something like that. But I still like futzing with this stuff a little, so for now, I’ll stay with the traditional web hosting plan, where I’m free to mess things up and forget to update PHP and stuff like that. But I think I’m getting close to the point where I’m going to want to hand this stuff off to somebody else and just concentrate on the blogging and not worry about the sysadmin side of things. Maybe in another three years.