If you own a site, chances are you may host it somewhere in the cloud. Depending on which hosting company you may get a varying degree of freedom in choosing which operating system and applications you may be allowed to use. Some hosting platforms are pretty diligent on maintaining its servers so that the software they use will be kept as close to the most updated version as possible, while making it as seamless as possible to the general user.
So shouldn’t this be a good thing?
It would be if the CMS you’re using as kept up-to-date as are the rest of the system. Sadly that isn’t always the case. Often site owners are reluctant to upgrade their CMS to the newest version because it’s often hard to justify the added cost and time investment put into upgrading, especially when the site is working fine. So it’s not rare to see site owners being unpleasantly surprised when their hosting company upgrading their OS and/or applications so far ahead that their CMS no longer supports it, and they have to scramble to make emergency fixes and patches so that they can keep the site running.
Drupal 6 is known to be one of these CMS when running on PHP 5.4 and up. Drupal 6 was developed back in the days when PHP 4 was still widely used. So it is not hard to imagine how hard it can be to keep up with the more recent changes made to newer PHP versions. With the EOL (end-of-life) for Drupal 6 coming ever closer it will be increasingly more difficult.
If you can’t stop the wheels of change, what can you do?
One seemingly simpler solution is to mask up and patch up whatever errors you see on your site. There are guides on the web as to how to achieve this (say https://drupal.org/node/1913314 and https://drupal.org/node/1469736), but this only delays the inevitable as it only masks the problem and patching it would seem to be just as time consuming as making a proper fix.
Another way is to force a downgrade on PHP back to 5.3. There are also guides out there but this is even riskier than the approach above, for it involves manually compiling an older PHP version that can be prone to human errors, plus there is no guarantee that it can save time from doing a Drupal upgrade.
The best way in my opinion would be to perform a proper Drupal upgrade to keep up. Again there is a lot of support from the Drupal community to guide you along the way, and even with modules that can aid you with migrating data over to the new Drupal instances. It may take more time but it’ll certainly be money worth spending.
If you’re unsure about any of this you’re welcome to talk to us and we can help you with keeping your CMS to work with the most up-to-date standards and software.