Hello George,
Thank you so much for looking into it! This is very helpful!
I spoke to a couple other Bluehost agents and here is what happened in a nutshell:
1) Agent 1: shared hosting plans are limited to 5.6
2) Agent 2 (after I opened a ticket with WordPress): shared hosting plans support 5.7 but only for NEW users, old users continue using 5.6
3) Agent 3: the majority of the old users were migrated to 5.7 but “a few stragglers are still being upgraded to 5.7 but those are older type legacy style servers”
So based on this my guess is the following:
Bluehost updated MySQL for most of the users (I presume around 2 years ago at least, since 5.6 reached its end of life in February 2021) but some accounts were missed. At the moment they can’t do it manually because shared hosting plans don’t permit such intervention. this is why they are telling me to upgrade to VPS or dedicated (those allow you to upgrade your MySQL whenever you want)
Do you have any suggestions on how this can be further escalated?
Also, just to understand the full picture: how long has your friend had this plan for? did it come with 5.7 already or was it updated at some point?
Thank you again and appreciate your help!
