What version of PHP is considered "Standard" for most web hosts? [closed]

Question

I have been surprised to learning that a number of my hosted sites only support 5.1.6, when my dev box is running 5.3.x. This is a huge disappointment, because I've been working with namespaces (5.3+) and other features that seem to me to be excellent, if not strictly necessary.

Anyway, when writing code that is designed to be portable (eg: plugins for popular platforms like WordPress), what version of PHP should I be targeting, based on the minimum version that's supported on the majority of web hosts out there.

Does anyone know? How can one find out?

Answer 1

Check http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all out.

It contains a lot of PHP stats. As of 12 Dec 2012,

• Version 5 is used by 96.4% of all the websites which use PHP.
• Version 5.3 is used by 42.3% of all the websites which use PHP version 5
• Version 5.2 is used by 52.8% of all the websites which use PHP version 5

Answer 2

My godaddy hosting account is on 5.2.17. If you want code to be portable then I would go with a general baseline of 5.0 features, which is pretty big feature set.