What version of PHP should I upgrade my hosting to?

Question

PHP

Hello. On my shared hosting - Version PHP 5.3.
I received the following message from Piwik:

Piwik will be ending support for this version of PHP in May 2015. Update your PHP version before it's too late! The version of PHP 5.3 you are using has ended its lifecycle (EOL). We strongly recommend upgrading to the current version, as using an outdated version exposes you to security vulnerabilities and bugs that are fixed in the more recent version of PHP.

If you update PHP according to the instructions https://www.reg.ru/support/hosting-i-servery/hosti... , then the updates will affect all sites.

I host websites with CMS NetCat and WebAsyst Shop-Script. Can you please tell me if I update my PHP version, will anything break on our sites?
And tell me, to which version is it better to upgrade? What is more stable?

Answer 1

In two weeks, support for 5.4 will be completely discontinued, and they only remembered about 5.3.
Update to current. According to the release calendar , there is only one current branch now: PHP 5.6
If something breaks - deploy the test environment and check it first.

Answer 2

Extreme stable 5.6, objectively stable 5.5.
Jump to 5.5 and check the functionality, if everything is fine, then try on 5.6, if everything is fine, and maybe even better, then stay on 5.6.

Answer 3

quite likely to break
before the last major 5.6