Preamble
Wikimedia Italia has a VPS recently called wmi-fabula (Wikimedia Italia server details) running Centos7 and serving lot of websites sharing PHP 5.6 as shared dependency.
Currently it serves nearly 100 virtualhosts (!).
At the time of writing we have an Apache HTTPd configured with the mod_php module.
Proposal
Our VPS should allow to serve websites requiring recent versions of PHP like PHP7 and without impacting in any way legacy websites needing the old PHP 5.6.
This thing is currently not possible and blocks this
Additionally, this forces us to rely on another server belonging to a volunteer to deploy this kind of recent applications.
Also, this feature would also simplify our migrations to recent versions of PHP for our legacy websites. At the time of writing it's difficult (or nearly impossible!) to deal with such bulk migration (again, we have 100 virtualhosts).
Proposed solution
We can achieve the result of supporting two or more PHP versions adopting a recent php-fpm package together with mod_php. This should allow to leave the legacy configurations as-is and just introduce a new virtualhost proxying to the internal PHP-FPM running PHP 7.3.