Legacy PHP applications are everywhere — quietly running real businesses on hosting environments that are years behind current standards. When the server finally needs to move, or the hosting contract ends, you are left with a site built on a framework that officially reached end-of-life over a decade ago, running on a PHP version that modern hosts no longer support.
This case study documents the full migration of skylinerenting.eu, a Brussels-based real estate rental platform, from an aging Combell shared hosting environment running PHP 5.4 to a SiteGround server running PHP 7.4. The site was built on Symfony 1.3 with Doctrine 1.x — a stack that has not received official support since 2012.
Project Overview
Skyline Renting Services is a property rental and sales agency operating in Brussels, Belgium. Their website handles property listings, search filtering, contact forms, and a custom backend for managing properties and team members. The site had been running on the same hosting and codebase for years, and the client needed to move to a more modern, faster host without rebuilding the entire application.
| Project | Website migration and PHP upgrade |
| Client | Skyline Renting Services (Brussels, Belgium) |
| Source hosting | Combell shared hosting — PHP 5.4.15 |
| Target hosting | SiteGround — PHP 7.4.33 |
| Framework | Symfony 1.3 / Doctrine 1.x |
| Timeline | 25 November – 19 December 2025 (approx. 3.5 weeks) |
The Core Challenge
The client initially assumed the site could simply be copied to the new server and pointed at the new PHP version. In practice, moving from PHP 5.4 to PHP 8.4 — the default on the target host — would have required rewriting significant portions of the framework and all dependent libraries. PHP 8.x removed or changed behavior for dozens of functions that Symfony 1.x and Doctrine 1.x relied on heavily.
The strategy instead was to find the highest PHP version the existing codebase could be made to run on with minimal changes, then migrate to that version. After testing, PHP 7.4.33 proved to be the right target — new enough to be supported on modern hosting, old enough that the core framework issues were fixable without a full rewrite.
What This Series Covers
This case study is split into two detailed follow-up articles. The first covers the technical problems encountered during the migration — Apache redirect loops, Doctrine compatibility issues, SwiftMailer path errors, and plugin conflicts — and how each was resolved. The second documents the go-live process: database migration, DNS cutover, SSL configuration on the new host, and the final Symfony cache issues that caused a brief outage during the domain switch.
If you are dealing with a similar legacy Symfony 1.x site and need to move it to a PHP 7.x environment, this series documents the exact problems you are likely to encounter and the specific fixes that worked.
Result
The migration was completed successfully. The site — frontend and backend — runs stably on SiteGround under PHP 7.4.33. No features were lost. The codebase was not rewritten; only targeted compatibility fixes were applied to the framework vendor files and configuration. The client experienced a brief period of downtime during DNS propagation, which was resolved within the same evening.