I use powweb, but only for a personal website. They have been running php 5.2 as long as I've used them (years), despite 5.3 being out for over 2 years now. They refuse to upgrade - even when I flat out told them they're running old crap that is deprecated, and it would cost them my business. They shrugged it off.
I manage my own servers (I 'm a Linux addict
) and from my experience in various Linux distributions, I will tell you this:
Some distributions like Centos, Suse etc have a policy to NOT use the latest versions of programs. So, in their auto-update servers, they do not include php 5.3
Other distributions follow a different methodology. They always make available the cutting edge releases.
Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks.
The conservative approach means that your existing softwares not going to break easily. Alas, you don't get to play with the latest goodies. They do port backwards the security updates though, so even if a 0-day for 5.2 existed but not for 5.3, the distribution will create/distribute a patch for 5.2.
With the cutting edge releases, there is the danger that something will break more easily. Remember the recent flop with the release of PHP that got recalled because of huge bugs?
So, I can understand why hosting companies are reluctant to upgrade. I use the cutting-edge approach, but I have redundant machines to move my sites if something goes wrong, plus I don't have to apologize to anyone about downtime.
I always have my big clients' sites on conservative distros. Saves a lot of phone-calls
