Frequently Asked Questions

In a shared hosting environment such as we offer, keeping everyone's web site safe and secure is of vital importance. We have carefully constructed our PHP 5 Fast environment to make your site and its files as secure as possible while still running at maximum performance, and PHP's safe_mode is currently one of the many essential components of that environment.

We do offer PHP 5 Flex, which is a way to run PHP without safe_mode restrictions in our CGI environment. If the need is great, PHP 5 Flex should be compatible with certain legacy applications (e.g. Gallery) that malfunction if safe_mode is enabled, but it generally runs at least 3-10 times slower than PHP 5 Fast.

Most people who choose PHP 5 Flex do so for the wrong reasons. It can mask the existence of certain problems and thus sometimes appears to be an easy way to make broken things appear to work. Due to the severe performance penalty, we strongly recommend against using PHP 5 Flex to circumvent open_basedir() restrictions or PHP file permissions issues. Problems with open_basedir are almost always caused by incorrect path configurations or depending on bad default paths, issues which are typically very easy to resolve under PHP 5 Fast. File permissions issues merely require a basic understanding of the Unix owner/group file permissions system. If you use PHP 5 Flex to solve the problem instead, you will destroy the performance of your site for no reason. See Writing Files in PHP for more information.

If your need is appropriate, you can switch to PHP 5 Flex by visiting the "Sites" page and clicking on the short name of the relevant site. On the next page, in the "Actions" box, select "Change Server Type."