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If you plan on making use of PHP within your hosting and your website plans and possibly intend to install and use PHP scripts then you may need to check what version of PHP your web host is currently running.

At some web hosts they will have both PHP4 and PHP5 available and in the majority of cases you are going to be fine, but as you know, there are always minor differences between what one company and another offers and how soon they plan to upgrade their version or versions of PHP.

Some website scripts can encounter minor problems with a version of PHP and sometimes after an upgrade by the host it can result in a few customers experiencing minor problems, and in most cases these problems can and will be sorted with a few tweaks either made by the account holder or by someone within your company if someone else is in charge of that type of action.

But if your about to sign up with a webhost and know you want to use one or more PHP scripts for a website project then its advisable to check the online or PDF documentation for the script that you intend to use, or however else they present the documentation, then take a look at the webhost and see what versions of PHP they offer, if you cant find this information easily then send them an email or give them a quick phone call to find out what version of PHP they offer and while your asking, its worth finding out if they will be ceasing the use of a particular version, because if you know you need any specific version to run your script and that the webhost is doing away with it then you need to know how much of a problem this would be for you.

In the majority of cases you should be fine, and many hosts handle the upgrades very well in order to not affect customers and potential customers.

But because there are many PHP based scripts out there and updated with varying frequency or in some cases not updated, and combining that with the massive amount of web hosting services you want to check everything that you can to avoid any hiccups.

Some web hosts keep customers informed of PHP upgrades and give warning incase of any minor difficulties to customers and in many cases, a good web host will help you anyway in whatever way possible to save you from too many compatibility problems between your website and the version of PHP installed on the servers.