A lot of people still uses CentOS 6 because it’s stable, it has still initscripts and iptables (and not the systemd and the firewalld) and why to even update to CentOS 7?
I am using CentOS 6 too. I am running more than 15 pages on my machine so I am using ISP Config because it’s really easy to maintain.
I really like the stability of CentOS 6 and I appreciate, that it has very stable PHP 5.3.3 version with MySQL 5.1. Firstly I decided to switch from MySQL 5.1 to something newer because none of my webpages uses this. I have choosen MariaDB 5.5 from Red Hat Software Collections. It is just so easy to use! You have to start service named mariadb55-mysqld instead of mysqld and thats all. Just keep in mind, that config files are in /opt/rh/mariadb55/root/etc/ instead of the regular location.
That’s it – it’s super easy. I think that MariaDB 5.5 is stable enough to be used in production (maybe it’s because I play with it a lot).
But what about PHP? I am running ownCloud version 7 which have some features which are not supported by PHP 5.3. I like the idea to have PHP 5.3 installed too so I decided to install PHP 5.5 in parallel so I took it from Software Collections again. Then it’s really easy to enable it in ISPConfig. ISPConfig has an ability to add another version of PHP by itself. So just add it and fill it like this:
File /usr/bin/php-cgi-55 is a script in a fact because Software Collections have to be enabled before usage.
$ cat /usr/bin/php-cgi-55 scl enable php55 "/opt/rh/php55/root/usr/bin/php-cgi $@"
Well and that’s it. Then you just have to switch the site to your new PHP version from ISP Config and here we go – you are running you webpage in PHP 5.5 on CentOS 6.