Parse error: syntax error

Per the documentation, you need PHP 5.3.4 or any later version to use this plugin.

Please remember that all PHP versions prior to 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 are currently end of life. They contain very important, well-published security issues and functional bugs. As such you should not use them on live sites. Please ask your hosts to upgrade the PHP version running on your server to the latest released version of PHP 5.4

Great! Thanks for the reply. So I am currently transferring one on my WP sites from Godaddy to a cPanel SiteGround account, so I think that might take care of it for that WP site. I have my remaining WP sites on Godaddy still, however, I just updated my server to cPanel with them, so that might take care of any plugin/PHP issues on that end as well.

…am I correct in thinking this?

Using cPanel is largely irrelevant. The main thing is the PHP version. SiteGround does use PHP 5.4 by default, so you won’t have any problems with them. GoDaddy does allow you to use a more recent PHP version but you have to ask them. Depending on the service package you have and the actual physical server you’re hosted on the instructions to change the PHP version will be different.

Ok, thanks for your help!! It works on SiteGround, but not on the newer server I transferred to on Godadday. I’ll have to figure out what to do with that…

Am I going to run into other problems for any of my WP blogs with Godaddy’s server if it is not on a PHP 5.0+. I might just transfer everything over to SiteGround, just wanted to keep business separate from personal…Would you recommend ditching Godaddy all together?

Well, you are using PHP less than 5.0?! In 2015?!?!?! Considering that PHP 4.4 became end of life in August 2008 –nearly seven years ago– I’d say that you’re amazingly, extremely, unspeakably too late to upgrade your site’s PHP version. Forget the functional issues in such an ancient version of PHP. Forget the security issues. Just the mere fact that PHP 5.5 is over TEN times faster should be enough to get you migrating your sites like there’s no tomorrow!

Regarding GoDaddy, I’m not entirely decided on whether you should ditch them or not. If you had asked me a year and a half ago I’d say “run for your life”. About that time the business was sold to a different investor who has different priorities, i.e. actually provide decent hosting instead of trying to rip off clients and plaster their pages with misogynist ads. I’ve spoken to GoDaddy engineers and these guys are really trying their best. Their service quality is not “there” yet, but they’re changing fast. So I’d say no, don’t ditch them, just be patient. Most issues can be resolved if you can get past the semi-intelligent drones at the first level of support and talk to someone who actually knows what a server looks like and that the cloud is not made of water vapour.

But if you do have a choice between using SiteGround and GoDaddy, right now SiteGround is your best bet. Disclaimer: my company site’s hosting is sponsored by SiteGround.

Yeah, Its odd that I just had Godaddy upgrade me to a newer server, and it still looks like it is not up to date. I started with them in 2007, and I was (unknowingly) still on that “ancient” server. When I called them and found this out (after chatting with you) I had them transfer me for free to a newer one with cPanel. I am disappointed that that one may still not be up to date. I haven’t ever had an issue with Goddaddy, even when everyone else did and complained profusely about them. I stuck with them because I kept seeing new improvements over the years. Although, my sites have all been rather small until recently. And the customer service has become very good recently.

My sites, since the transfer have increased in speed too.

I don’t have a problem that you are SiteGround biased. I spent two weeks with my business partner looking for the best option for our new sites that will be coming live soon, and found SiteGround to be a really good option. However, I am not sure the server I am on with SiteGround is actually a WP managed server, even though I asked them… I am not sure what the WP managed server looks like under the hood, but it doesn’t seem to be any different than my Godaddy linux server.

I have considered creating a multisite with my new creations, since they are all going under an umbrella company. Any thoughts on that?

I haven’t used SiteGround’s managed WordPress or Joomla! offerings so I can’t comment on that. But all hosting is under the hood an operating system (typically Linux, sometimes Solaris, Windows or very rarely Mac OS X Server), usually with a hosting control panel (typically cPanel or Plesk). The differences between hosts can be found in the all-important details:

• Available resources (CPU speed, memory limits, disk space, disk speed such as SSD vs HDD etc)
• Resource usage limits (not just CPU, memory and so on; I’ve seen hosts disallowing the creation of files over 1Mb!)
• Up-to-date software (55% of our users are on hosts with severely outdated / end-of-life server software!)
• Bandwidth, outbound and inbound
• Security model (SiteGround uses proper account isolation, meaning one hacked site can’t take down everything else)
• Technical support

As for your question regarding multisites: DON’T. I will give you the top two reasons on the top of my head.

Firstly, the security model is really bad. If a plugin used in just one site gets compromised (hacked) the entire mutlisite bundle is compromised. The same goes for any method of penetration: once there is a hacker in the hosting account of the multisite bundle all your sites are hacked. That’s the quickest way to lose all of your clients when only one of them gets sloppy.

Secondly, you can’t restore a single site of the multisite bundle. You might think this is not important, but when one of your clients deletes an all important article he wants restored a.s.a.p. you’ll be in a world of hurt.

There are many other reasons, ranging from much trickier handling of plugins/themes and per-site customisations to your sites becoming slow or corrupt due to hosting account limitations on disk I/O, network bandwidth and MySQL server usage. IMHO there are only two reasons to run a multisite stack: you have very similar, but not necessarily identical, sites in two or more languages; or you have a lot of low traffic blogs run by the same group of people with pretty much identical settings / themes / plugins. In these cases you can possibly live with the shortcomings of the multisite installation.

Wow! Thanks so much. That saved me a lot of research, especially since I didn’t come across anything with this info as of yet. I will definitely steer clear of the multisite option. Thanks again!