About 18 hours ago, I received this e-mail from BlueHost, which is the company that currently hosts this blog:
[...] we’re excited to announce that we will be upgrading all of our servers to newer versions of Apache and providing newer versions PHP (including PHP 7.1 & 7.2). The upgraded versions provide better data processing, which can improve the performance and speed of your website.
When will maintenance begin? We will start the maintenance process on March 13 at 6 PM EST and will continually monitor your website. We anticipate less than 5 minutes of slowness/downtime during the upgrade itself.
As I like to live life dangerously (as a white, middle-aged man like myself says), I run beta or alpha versions of WordPress. As such, I contacted BlueHost back in December (of 2018) and asked them to upgrade my PHP version to at least 7.3. They did; I subsequently upgraded WordPress some more, and no issues.
Until today, after BlueHost upgraded Apache and possibly downgraded my PHP version as well; I'm not sure about the latter, but hang in there.
I noticed that my WordPress site was down, as it threw an HTTP 500 Error as I tried to access the main page; access to individual pages was also impossible.
After BlueHost upgraded, this appeared when I checked out individual pages—while the main blog page just gave a HTTP 500 Error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in /var/www/my_wp_path/wp-content/plugins/block-gallery/includes/admin/class-block-gallery-action-links.php on line 87.
That error is detailed here:
https://github.com/thatplugincompany/block-gallery/issues/20
However, BlueHost resolved the entire matter by (they claim):
- upgrading PHP
- renaming php.ini
The weird thing is that my cPanel in BlueHost claims that I'm currently using PHP 5.6.40. Still, WordPress is (not yet) complaining about it, and everything is back to normal; no slowness issues or anything like that so far.